Saturday, August 18, 2007

Book sharing the social software way

Its amazing how much you find through sharing and exploring the web through del.icio.us links! I have bookmarked sites, my friends add me to their network of bookmarked sites, I find other people's networks and their bookmarked sites...it goes on and on, but you can find some fascinating websites and applications. One of my fellow librarians has bookmarked some cool sites and this one called Shelfari is similar to LibraryThing, where you add books (catalog), make recommendations, write reviews, and talk about books with others. Shelfari is a bit more limiting than LibraryThing -- it doesn't have the capability of finding an exact ISBN match to a title (which, by the way, drives me crazy as a librarian!!) so the books on my "shelf" in Shelfari may not be the editions I actually own at home in the "real" world. These applications do have the capability of creating real communities on the web, much the way chat rooms and discussion forums did in the first generation of websites.
Besides, didn't every kid want to catalog their books and play "library"? Or was that just geeky me???