23 Things: The Tenth Tool = Book/Library Catalogs

The purpose of this exercise was to try out LibraryThing, an online service that is designed to let members easily catalog their personal book collections. Small libraries can also use it to catalog their collections. I cataloged five items: Two were books whose bibliographic details were automatically retrieved through Amazon (you can also choose to have them retrieved through the Library of Congress); two were grey literature titles, so I entered the bibliographic details manually; and one was a chapter in a book, so I entered its details manually too. While LibraryThing's main template is book-oriented, you can still enter other types of documents, like book chapters and journal articles. For these, the only consideration is that the onus is on you to enter the details consistently, since the system will display them as entered.

Clicking on "Your Library" displays all the items you've entered alphabetically by title. There are several different display options available. And all your entries are searchable, or you can browse by tags.

This would certainly be a useful tool for small information centers who lack an online catalog. It just requires time to enter the bibliographic details.

23 Things: New Books RSS Feed

One service I offer on my other blog, Forced Migration Current Awareness, is announcements about "New Books" on refugees, forced migration, internal displacement, and the humanitarian sector. In the past I have created custom RSS feeds using the Amazon Feed Generator. Basically, this allows you to enter keywords, generate a feed, then receive updates when new books with those matching keywords are added to Amazon's database. For various reasons, though, this has not been an optimal solution.

After being introduced to del.icio.us through SLA's 23 Things program, I thought of a way to supplement my new books service. Basically, whenever I come across notices of new book titles, I bookmark those pages in del.icio.us and tag them as "newbooks." del.icio.us automatically generates RSS feeds for all tags, so I've subscribed to the newbooks feed, and when updates appear in my Google newsreader, I "share" them so that they appear in my "New Books" feature in the sidebar of my blog. This ensures that anything missed in my Amazon feed can still be picked up and highlighted.