Week 12 (Aug 9-16)

Learning 2.0 @ HKUST Week 12 Activities

Online Application II: LibraryThing

A Web 2.0 tool for book lovers!

LibraryThing is a tool for social networking for book lovers, social cataloging and also a personal library tools (For more information about LibraryThing, see Wikipedia)This week, we’ll tour the LibraryThing site and learn to organize a personal book collection together and discover a wealth of information about books and readers.

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I. What you can do using LibraryThing:

1. create your personal book collection or online catalog quickly


2. add and swap book information with others


3. tag and catalog your books


4. find readers who read the similar books or authors and share & discuss your reading


5. look at thousands of book reviews


6. view your favourite author page

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II. Libraries using LibraryThing for Libraries

• The Pierce Law Library has created a page for books in social media and technology. This page not only contains basic book information, but also provides reviews and description from the LibraryThing.


• To promote its collection of the "Heralds of Science", the Smithsonian Libraries created a page on LibraryThing which aims to links readers to books and share common interest.
  [Hmm... would it be nice to create a page for our Paul T.K Lin Collection on LibraryThing?]


• Librarians who LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com/groups/librarianswholibrar) - a place where librarians share interests and information. You will find a lot of interesting topics here. Look at the Zeitgeist" page and you will get many amazing figures.

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III. Activity
Let's build a English book collection for Learning 2.0 @HKUST group!

1. Login LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com)
id: hkustlibrarything
pw: learning2.0

2. Select ‘add book’ tab

3. Search ONE book you like

4. Select your search from Amazon.com OR Library of Congress, etc

5. Click to select a book on right hand side, once you click on the link, the book will be added

6. Click 'Edit book', you can add any tags to describe your book or write a review under 'book details' tab

7. Books are added! Then back to ‘Your books’ tab, you can see our collection!

Note: LibraryThing is a place for you to create your online bookshelf and view book information but not really reading the whole book via this site.

ENJOY!