Having some cataloguing experience I found Library Thing interesting to use. It was difficult to catalogue anything more than twenty years old. A number of books I could not find. For example ‘Pedigree cats and kittens : how to choose and care for them’, written by Paddy Cutts and published in 1981 I could easily find in Libraries Australia but not on Library Thing. Fortunately items can be manually catalogued. But this solution depends on the user having some cataloguing skills needed such as when filling in the dewey field. The date field didn’t indicate if you needed to add only the year. The publication field didn’t indicate if you needed to add place as well as name of publisher. A brief guide would have helped here.
What I did find interesting about this exercise was the use of tags. Like subject headings these can be applied subjectively. However this subjectiveness is taken to a completely different level. An example that I’ve seen in some of the literature is that of the use of the term ‘unread’ as a tag. While this might make sense for the person creating the record it means nothing for anything else looking at the person’s blog. So as far as I can see this means searching will result in as many irrelevant hits as you would get using a search engine. With Library Thing I found that it was not clear how the information was to be entered in the tags field. But it appears to have a thesaurus which automatically separates the tags.
Check out my catalogue at library thing:
http://www.librarything.com/
