Item 15: Tagging and Folksonomies - LibraryThing and Goodreads

A growing social network category is that of the Book Review Network, where users create lists of books, write reviews of them, group books together in new ways, and use each other to find more books that they might like. A book oriented social network has the capability of being one of the ultimate reader's advisory tools. Two sites that have become quite popular in this genre are: LibraryThing and goodreads.

Here are some overviews of each site:

LibraryThing Tour

How Goodreads Works


Activities:

1. Take a look at the overviews for both sites.
2. Create an account for one of them (if you are already a member of one, please join the other).
3. Add at least 5 books to your library.
4. Blog about your findings and be sure to link to your profile you created. What do you like about the one you chose? What do you wish was different?

LibraryThing - how to sign up and what you can do there

1. Go to LibraryThing and click "Join Now."
   
2. Sign up for an account.
3. Add books to your library
   • Just type in the title, author, or ISBN (a nice feature for those of you who have bar-code scanners at your desk...), and then select your book from the list that pops up on the right. You can search Amazon or the Library of Congress.
   • If your book or edition does not appear, you can build a new record for it from scratch by clicking "Add the book manually"
4. Tag your books -
   • You can add tags to your books when you are building your library, or by clicking the pencil icon next to the record.
5. Write reviews of your books
   • To write a review of a book, you have to click on the 'pencil' icon next to the book on your library page.

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Goodreads - how to sign up and what you can do there

1. Go to goodreads and click “get started.”
2. Fill out the form. Once you’ve given your name, email and a password, you’re ready to go.
3. You can import information from an Excel Spreadsheet, if it’s formatted properly. Goodreads has an example of an Excel file that you can look over for reference (once you've signed in to your account).
4. You can search for books through Goodreads, and quickly add them to your list. Goodreads looks for books at Amazon.com and at their own site.
   • This is different from LibraryThing. LibraryThing looks for books at Amazon.com, the Library of Congress, and 68 other libraries, but you have to do a separate search at LibraryThing in order to see what’s on LibraryThing.
5. To search for books at Goodreads, just click on “Add more books.”
   • You can search by title, author (or both at once) and ISBN. This will attempt to locate your book at Amazon.com or Goodreads.
   • You can also manually add books by filling out a simple form. This is pretty similar to LibraryThing, although I like goodreads form better – it’s a little clearer on what should go in each field.
6. Adding books that you find in your searches is much quicker at goodreads than at LibraryThing.
   • Whether you’re looking at just the book record or a list of books, you can add a title to your list of books with two clicks. To do this, look at a list of books. Each one has five stars next to its title, as well as the phrase “add to my books.” If you click on the number of stars you would give the item, it will automatically add it to your list of books.
   • After adding the book in such a way, your option changes to “add my review.” We’ll come back to that momentarily.
   • The other choice “Add to my books,” will open up a form, which allows you more customization. Among other things, you can select a “shelf” on which to place the book you’re adding.
   • “Shelves” fall into several generic categories, but you can also customize and make your own shelf names. This can be great if you have a large collection of items, and you want to be able to differentiate them better.
   • By clicking on the drop-down menu next to “choose shelves” you are given the option of selecting from two pre-made shelves, “currently-reading” and “to-read,” as well as the option of creating a new shelf, or editing an existing shelf.
   • When you select and name a new shelf, the item is automatically added to that shelf. If you want it to be on more than one shelf, you can look at the item record later, select “edit” next to the bookshelves, and add another shelf to the item.
7. If you have more than 50 items added to your goodreads account, you can apply for librarian status. This will give you the ability to edit records.