I was reading the Institute for the Future of the Book's if:book blog when a posting about LibraryThing jumped out at me. As I am immersed in the world of academics and technology, this Web 2.0 site called a "Facebook for books" is a great example of how online social software is bringing people together in ways never before imagined.
At its most basic level, LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. A free account permits you to catalog up to 200 books. But with tagging, a blog, groups and a discussion board, it is so much more. So far members have catalogued more than 16 million books
If you have been wondering about why our students are so interested in participating in social networking groups such as Facebook, note this comment from a user of Library Thing:
"Perhaps my favorite thing about LibraryThing is that you can track down someone who shares your tastes and request a direct recommendation or ask them if a book you're thinking of buying is any good."
Another wonderful feature of this site is that you can search the Library of Congress, all five national Amazon sites, and more than 80 world libraries. "You can edit your information, search and sort it, "tag" books with your own subjects, or use the Library of Congress and Dewey systems to organize your collection."
You can see another example of Web 2.0 in practice at the Institute for the Future of the Book. I talked about HASTAC last week and the Institute is sponsoring a HASTAC paper The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.
The first draft of this paper, written for the MacArthur program, is online as a wiki and enables "anyone to edit it, make comments, and contribute examples of innovative work."
Comments (1)
No doubt very helpful for the readers! Most of the posts in the blog sparks some great knowledge...Uk Essays
Thanks for the information!
Posted by UK Essays | February 25, 2009 12:39 AM
Posted on February 25, 2009 00:39