Beyond Method #5: Social Cataloging and Libraries

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Social Cataloging and Libraries

I've been using Goodreads for about three years now. An inveterate list-maker, I use it to log the books I've read. I don't have that much experience using either Goodreads or LibraryThing as a reader's advisory tool but based on the content I reviewed for this lesson, I definitely can see how they could be useful. It does require the ongoing effort of tagging your additions to your lists, however, and I don't know if I'm willing to go that extra step since I'm already reading books and reading about reader's advisory (via blogs, professional literature and vendor catalogs).

I do, however, rate the books I've read, and that came in handy just last week when an adult patron came in wanting book recommendations but didn't have much criteria to filter those recommendations. After asking him what he liked to read (he didn't know; he'd only recently begun reading again) and what he didn't like to read (he did give me a few examples of the type of writing he wasn't fond of, such as narratives that jumped wildly around such as Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five), I decided to check my Goodreads list for what I'd read recently that I'd greatly enjoyed. I filtered my list by rating and ended up choosing three very different stories to propose to him:

• John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany
• Rick Yancey's The Monstrumologist
• Louis Bayard's The Black Tower

I was so glad I had that list to refer to; I have a terrible memory and would have failed miserably at dredging up any of my recently read titles on my own. This story has a happy ending, too — not all reader's advisory moments do. After I gave him a brief synopses on all three books, the patron picked A Prayer for Owen Meany (one of my favorite books of all time that I'd recently re-read). He realized it had inspired the movie Simon Birch and after reading the first few pages said he already liked it. Score.

But back to the original topic: I do appreciate how Goodreads and LibraryThing both make it so easy to craft widgets of your book lists that can be used on your own webpage. I use the Goodreads widget on my own blog and hope to do so with my library's redesigned website to show patrons what the librarians are reading and want to read.