Playing with LibraryThing

Playing with LibraryThing

I find LibraryThing to line up with many of the resources I've found as well as the interviews I completed. First and foremost, I find this technology to be easy to use. Adding books to a collection is as easy as typing in the title, author, ISBN, or other information about the book and selecting from the list. On the off chance the book does not populate within the list, there is also the feature of adding it manually and also importing the book cover. I can also import new images for the books I find that have incorrect covers (or at least not the same jacket as my book).

I also appreciate the Zietgeist feature of the site and the fact that sharing my collection or viewing that of another is as simple as locating it. LibraryThing is definitely meant as a home cataloging system since the default when adding a book is that it is part of my collection however I have no issue with changing the location of the book to one I've read but do not own for my personal collection. In terms of this being a feature for a classroom collection, I think this is a major plus. When adding books, defaulting to owning the book is great since only books that are owned will be logged in the scenario of educators using LibraryThing for their classroom collections (with some help from students).

Essentially, playing with the technology confirmed by notions of this being useful for educators in a K-12 environment, now for seeing this happen somewhere...