Web 2.0 Revisited: Online Applications

I recently got back into using Goodreads.com as a means to keep track of the books I have read and what I thought about them. You read a lot of books as a librarian - some for pleasure, some for reader's advisory, some for book discussions - and sometimes you forget if you've read a certain book or what the book was even about. Goodreads gives you the opportunity to keep track in a simple to use format. My friend and I are now using it to suggest books to eachother. You can even add books to a "to read" list - way better than having scraps of paper with titles and authors scribbled on them, scattered around your desk! I can't begin to tell you the number of paper lists of books I've meant to read that have been lost over the years. Tragic really.

Another interesting online application is LibraryThing. We actually used this site in my cataloging course as a way of creating our own little library. It's a neat site and could be very useful for people who have large personal collections. As it is, my persoanl collection fits neatly on two shelves on my desk, but of course, I get a lot of books from the library or through interlibrary loan.

While LibraryThing is a cool site, I can't really think of a good use for it for established libraries. As far as reader's advisory is concerned, I think Goodreads is better because you can rate books and send suggestions to friends. It looks like LibraryThing is developing a new RSS tracker to upload news to Facebook etc. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of your Goodreads friends to be sent to your email. So if you like your librarian's suggestions, you could subscribe and follow what he or she reads. It could be interesting if it was set up by genre. For instance, patrons could follow my Mysteries Goodreads account. Depending on your community, it could be very useful or not at all useful.