My personal tastes (Thing 13)

I created my Library Thing badge to share just a few of the books I've read in, oh, relatively recent memory. Or just books I love. I hope you love a few too.



Flagler College library home page has a "New Acquisitions" blog type list, but there are so many buttons on the home page that I wonder what its use stats are. I don't know whether Library Thing would improve our current system or not, actually.

I have asked to have my 23 Things blog linked to on the library home page, but the director thought it wasn't a good idea. If I had my own library blog, I would definitely use Library Thing because of its bright colors and attractive appearance. I haven't used the tag clouds for my books, but they could be useful for our library's virtual visitors.

I'm Delicious! (Thing 10)

I had never used Delicious before, and I was curious about what it was and how to use it. Mystery resolved!

I created a Delicious account and added three blogs that I find fun to unwind to after a day of serious computing. I added the Delicious badge to my Wysocki in 23 Bytes blog, which displayed my Delicious username and not the blogs I’m following. I would rather it list my blogs than my username, which may be reparable, but I’m not getting into it now.

What I like about Delicious is the possibility for library homepages to use this tool. One of the most frequent questions I get is “How do I cite this in [APA/MLA/Chicago Manual]?” Pretty much every library website has some link to citation guides, but it would be interesting to see the Delicious links to other citation resources. Duke of course comes to mind with their excellent style guide resources.

Delicious also might be fun to link new acquisitions to Amazon or Barnes & Noble (or whatever). Amazon always brings up the “Shoppers who liked this book also liked this,” a fun and helpful feature.

I'd also love to see students' free text searching methods and incorporate their tags into the catalog. I just had a student ask for books ON War and Peace, and I found the OPAC a little balky. It kept wanting to show me war and peace in Europe, the Middle East, negotiating peace in time of war... I had to really push the OPAC to see what I wanted for her. We resolved the dilemma, but it seemed like it could have been easier.

I definitely look forward to exploring Pagekeeper since it is designed for an educational environment. It may turn out to be more useful for my academic library than Delicious.