Thing 11: tagging and del.icio.us

Tags work a little differently in different environments (see what I wrote about LibraryThing)!

I have looked at the del.icio.us material and set up the widget and tag function on my IE browser and started the import of one of my browser "favorites" folders. I am still waiting for the import to finish as I am writing this.

The idea of being able to get to my bookmarks from whereever is a great one. Anything that helps organize bookmarks will be great. Mine need a greater degree of organization. I don't know if del.icio.us will help enough or not until I can see how the imported ones appear and what else I should do with them.

I think it is also something that could be useful for some of our library users.

I also looked at Furl and Pagekeeper, which appear to have a better visual interface.

Non linear accomplishment of things: Thing 14 (LibraryThing)

LibraryThing is not new to me. Over a year ago, I set up an account...but I'll be darned if I can remember what the username or password were! Luckily, my recollection is that I didn't put a lot of books into it!

Over the past weekend, I spent a great deal of time on LibraryThing for a personal blog I have started as a result of 23 Things.

I learned then that, contrary to another online universe that I have been spending time with, LibraryThing considers 2-word phrases as whole tags (that other place considers each word separated by a space as a separate tag). LibraryThing notices the end of a tag (when there are several) by the insertion of a comma when you are tagging. I learned this the hard way since I put a random books (book covers) widget into my personal blog and had to edit most of the tags on the close to 40 books I had put in to get the subset of the ones I wanted to show up.

How would we use LibraryThing here in the library? Well, we could put the covers up of our newest books. Right now we have a New Books list that we publish on the website quarterly after we receive it from OCLC. It would be additional work to add these items to LibraryThing and a certain number of them won't have covers already in LibraryThing. For the 5 books I put in, two of them have covers that are images I grabbed from the publisher's website.

At this point, I didn't put the link in the random covers to link to "my LibraryThing" since there are only 5 books in it.

I am just not sure whether this is something that would be good for us or not? Maybe rather than linking such a display to our blog, it would make sense to insert it into our web site. I don't know how many patrons will look at the blog as opposed to the website?

I must admit, however, that I really do like the covers feature of LibraryThing as it appeals to visual people.