Thing #11: In which Stacey does that LibraryThing

Wow. How cool is this?! I had heard of LibraryThing, but had never looked too closely. To be honest, I was a bit intimidated. How the heck was I going to catalog all of my books? What a PITA that would be. Boy, was I wrong!

I peeked at the intro and gamely got started. Surprisingly easy! And fun. Okay, fun might be pushing it a bit, but way cool. My only (slight) disappointment is that you can only do one book at a time. I tend to collect books by the same authors and it could have gone a lot quicker if I typed in, for example, Julia Quinn, and checked off all of the books by her that I have. And since the ones I have are from her Bridgerton series, I could have done just one tag, as well.

I love that you can change the covers, too! And another example of a tag cloud.

I could see this being a great readers' advisory tool at HCL, not only for customers, but from librarian to librarian. What a great way to have customers connect with librarians with similar reading tastes and then go to them for recommendations. So here's how it could work: On the Reader's Corner page there could be a section where librarian's have their LibraryThing posted as an author cloud or even a tag cloud. Customers could look at those clouds and see who has the authors or topics that they are looking for. Then there'd be a way to connect the customer with the librarian, perhaps via e-mail and then you could start up a reader's advisory/reference interview to put some fabulous books into that customer's hands. And staff could use the info to know that when the person is asking for another great romance book, go give Stacey a call. Just a thought.

In some ways, there is almost too much stuff there. I think it will take many visits to a) get my stuff cataloged onto there and b) appreciate all of the extras. And considering I have about 5 bookshelves of books, 3 or which are romance books (and that includes about 2 boxes worth of Nora Roberts' books), this could take some time (and possibly $).

And for those of you who didn't know, yes, I am a HUGE fan of romances and yes, Nora Roberts is a favorite. Next time you're @ Miller, stop by my office to see my signed Nora Roberts limited-edition bobblehead. So awful, it's awesome! :)