Saturday, April 16, 2011

PE5_LibraryThing



Okay, delving more into the LibraryThing I explored the extent of the forums, group creation and the special Zeitgeist feature. LibraryThing does have a decent forum setup, but keep in mind the forum boards are referred to as Talks, so the terminology is a little different. The boards go on forever and make it easy to search for whatever you are looking for and also autosort them by most recent and activeness which some sites don’t do. Making a group is easy enough. It’s a very simple form that you fill out and then you have a new Group, which has its own Privacy settings that allow you to adjust that to your heart’s content. With Groups, it creates a space for people or classes and allows all their things be in a collective cyber space, this includes discussions, posts, mail, messages and pictures. The only thing that bugs me a little is that I can’t invite people, or at least I don’t see a button for it right off the bat. You can even posts pictures within the group or umbrella it under your own personal Gallery. It let’s me do more than I thought it could. Also, the tagging feature also allows me to search a combination of forums, groups, interests, books and authors with user driven keywords, not the stuffy Library of Congress keywords that group everything under a handful of terms. O! when you are searching the database of books, its not only searching its database, but also that of Amazon.com, Library of Congress and its seven-hundred other sources. Neat yea? This expanded search functions allows me to search for user and allows me to monitor their activities as they fulfill their RILS. So this isn’t just a source for readers, but for writers as well, as writers can create and edit pages about them and their works. It’s a great way to reach out to your readers and get feedback. Not just for seasoned writers but for new writers as well that want to break out and tell readers about their books. LibraryThing also handles promotions so you can even give out free copies of your books to people in the community; it’s a really neat feature. Speaking of features, Zeitgeist is a statistics feature that takes a whole summary of the site like the current total number of members, books cataloged, tags, talks, books given out and other measureable numbers that prove most interesting. LibraryThing will be most useful for my RILS with its ability to search by user, create a group space and have a way to supervise my members that doesn’t give me all the power, or make its doesn’t seem like I do. With its over one million members, LibraryThing can only improve and grow. I encourage you to take a look for yourself and explore all this wonderful content and build your own library to add to the other online libraries. Until next time, time care and enjoy the weekend.

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