Wild (Library) Thing

You make my heart sing.

I would not use LT to catalog my own personal library. For one thing, I don't have a large personal library. (That's what the public library is for).

I could see using it for keeping track of books I have read and/or want to read. I have BookBag in my Palm, but it's kind of old and clunky and I don't keep it up so well.

I can't honestly say I see myself doing a lot of tagging, except of the "to be read" or "owned" variety. I already know what the books I've read are about and thinking up tags for them is not something I am so sure I want to devote a huge amount of time to. Maybe I'll rethink that as I use LT more.

One feature I adore about LTFL is that it shows other editions, translations, formats etc. I hate to think of how often patron's go away empty handed because they don't realize we have more than one edition of a book and they are on different records, or that the large print would work just fine for them but they didn't realize we had it.

Browsing the LT author cloud, I notice that LT users REALLY like Neil Gaiman and JRR Tolkein. And JK Rowling? At least as big or possibly a little bigger than Shakespeare. I wonder what, if anything, those observations say about LT users? Yeah, probably not much.

The applications to reader's advisory seem obvious, sort of, but to really work for RA, books need to be tagged according to appeal factors, and it's kind of hard for me to imagine that happening consistently on a large-scale basis.[Does that demonstrate a woeful lack of 2.0 imagination on my part?] The suggestions are OK, but they don't really get at what it is about a certain book that made you like it and want to read something else similar to it.

For Michael Perry's Truck: A Love Story, LT suggested Trucks by Byron Barton. Now I might be going out on a limb here, but there's no way a children's board book about trucks is in any way a readalike for Michael Perry. To be fair, this was not found by using the suggester, but both books are similarly tagged. That to me is a weakness of tagging--they both have the truck tag, but have nothing to do with each other.

LT suggested One for the Money by Janet Evanovich when I put in Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. I have read both, and the only commonality I can home in on is that they both have female protagonists that could be described as tough or gutsy. But Claire and Stephanie are tough and gutsy in completely different ways, and the two books don't in any way have the same feel.

After my traumatic experience of trying to put in a link to Flickr account, I am a little afraid to try linking to my account, but here goes: