Ning

I like Ning. I am guardedly excited about Ning.

I don’t care about creating profiles and having “friends,” but I do like the idea of having a private group. Wouldn’t this work well for an anime/manga, gaming, chess, book discussion club at a public library, especially one that meets only once a month? Or workshops, classes, staff for an academic library. It would also be pretty cool for a fantasy football league (do any libraries have these going on, too loud perhaps?).

I found the Library 2.0 Ning to be a rather barren and unused (thought I saw some tumbleweed at one point) resource excluding the CMS discussion. I am rather interested in Drupal and all the other CMSs (going to have to be in the future no matter what), and was very interested in what was being discussed by technologically superior librarians. Perhaps the LIS768 class is what is needed to get the blood flowing again. I think most of the Library 2.0 discussion is going on in the blogosphere. Wherever the Library 2.0ers are talking it is not in Ning.

LibraryThing

I use LibraryThing but mostly because I like looking at all those pretty covers. The suggested books I have received from it were mediocre at best, but I have to say the same thing about NoveList and all my fiends (not my library friends of course, all the suggestions I get from library folk are outstanding…) so this is not necessarily a condemnation of LibraryThing.

I have wondered how it can be used for libraries. I do like the suggestion of having it linked to an OPAC catalog with a tag cloud (check out the libraries already using this). This will give us one more tool for patrons to help themselves and for us to help them at the reference desk. How many times have you done some pearl growing to find that the subject heading you have just clicked on only applies to one book in the whole consortium (tell me what the point of subject heading to this degree in all of I-Share? Drives me crazy. Don’t misunderstand I love subject searching, just annoyed when it fails miserably)? Tag clouds would give us an option to do a sideways pearl growing when subject headings let us down.

I have had a few and will definitely have many more patrons not truly know what they are looking for i.g. “I need something about racism and how it affects people,”(An actual question I received recently) I think tag clouds may be an easier way of letting the patrons help themselves and narrow their questions.

I had a chance to suggest LibraryThing to a patron today. She was kvetching about bringing a book home and realizing later she had already read it. I told her the library does not keep records because of big brother, but perhaps LibraryThing is the answer. She could simply insert a book after finishing it and problem solved (could this be a problem, can the FBI access LibraryThing?).

If you look in the bottom right hand corner I was able to insert an RSS feed from LibraryThing on to WordPress. Sadly, WordPress does not allow JavaScript, therefor an RSS feed is the best that can be done.