Social Networking: LibraryThing

So on wednesday we were discussing all of the great elements that Delicious had which we all seemed to agree that it was a very useful site to arrange your references. I now want to add to the discussion by putting forth to you all about LibraryThing. Now I think that early in the semester I have discussed this before because we needed to look at it for Information Provisions but I have some things I would like to add now that I have used it a lot more and are now able to spot the similarities and differences between the other sites that have talked about.

Ok, so what does LibraryThing do? Well it is a way of being able to catalogue all of your books that you have read or that are in your book selves that you haven't read. Now you have them all in one place and you can share them with other people all of the world. They can look at what you have and also make suggestions for further reading. Which I think is awesome. This is what I find very interesting about this site as you come across things that you may never have thought about and you also get to talk to people who like the same things as you. You can also write reviews and you can also get free books as well if you write a review for it.

The creators describe LibraryThing as follows: "Librarything is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access you catalog from anywhere - even from you mobile phone. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth".

I don't think that it requires a particular browser as you are able to connect to LibraryThing anywhere. I thing that you just need a simple browser like Firefox or for Macs Safari. You also don't need any additional software as they have provided all of that. To collect all of their information for their books they use Endnote, Amazon and other libraries. So I guess that it is very similar to Endnote because they are collecting all of their references they just are not putting in as a bibliography.

It is very different to favourites and I think that it is more of a personal bookmarking than other sites we have discussed. With favourites it is mainly to bookmark your websites but with LibraryThing you are I guess bookmarking your books. If that makes any sense at all. 

It has a lot of social features as you are connecting to many, many, many people around the world and they can share all of your books and you can share theirs, awesome. All you need to like anything else is to subscribe to Librarything. This allows you to have up to 200 books in your catalog, if you want to had more than you need to pay either $10 for a year or $25 for a life time.

It is worth a look at so I hope that I have convinced you,

candy