Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Webcast - LibraryThing: A Social Cataloging Web Site

LibraryThing was one of the DSL topics, so I suppose it's appropriate that I viewed this webinar on LibraryThing (I don't think I've don't my LibraryThing activity yet, though - bad me). Tim Spalding, the founder of LibraryThing, talks about LibraryThing, what it can do, and what it means for libraries and the world of book cataloging. Some of the things he mentions are things I hadn't realized that LibraryThing could do - he also mentions a few things that hadn't occurred to me as possible uses for LibraryThing (the things that fell into this category, for me, were just about any of the social aspects of LibraryThing - I mostly think of it as a cataloging site).

Tim Spalding is an interesting speaker, which made this a good webcast. It relies a lot on visuals, which was a bit inconvenient for me, but I know enough about LibraryThing that I only needed to glance at the video occasionally to understand what he was talking about. Plus, I viewed some of this during my lunch break.

One thing that made this webcast interesting to me, besides the topic and Spalding's comments about tagging and LibraryThing's version of name and title authority control, was just getting to hear Spalding speak. He sometimes contributes to AUTOCAT, so it was interesting getting to see the person behind the emails.

By the way, after listening to this, I just had to check if "Dave's topic" still exists as a subject heading in the Library of Congress's catalog - it doesn't. It's still an amusing example, though. I wonder how long it took, after Spalding's talk, for "Dave's topic" to be removed?

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