librarything on our catalogue

As mentioned yesterday, here are a couple of screenshots of what it would look like if we had descriptive tags from LibraryThing added to each title on our library catalogue. Click on the images to see a larger version.

1) Do a search on the catalogue, as normal, and click on a title to open that record.

This is what you'd see; take a look at the orange tags appearing in the right-hand sidebar.

2) 'fables', you think, hmm, what else have we got by way of fables? So you click on the 'fables' tag, and a new window

opens:

3) Now, you can either click on any of the tags on the left to do more exploring by tag, or click on any of the titles on the right, to open that record and see what Manukau holds. And now that the tags are scoped, all of the titles appearing on the right should have at least one Manukau holding.

librarythings and failing to roll

I joined LibraryThing a while back, while I was on maternity leave and for some reason sizzling with energy for Doing Stuff (painting, cooking, craft... cataloguing?!), so I've already got a lot of stuff in my library there. Makes it handy for browsing in 2nd-hand bookshops, if you can check whether or not you already have a title - at least, that would be the theory if I ever kept my cellphone charged for making with the checking.
Just added the 'widgets' to my sidebar; a random selection of 10 from my 'library', and a search box. I like seeing the 10 random titles pop up - it's like a drive-by friendly wave from a mixed bunch of folk (some you really like, some you barely remember).

The LibraryThing pic below is a link to my catalogue. Looks like all of this stuff seems to work okay on the Learn.net.



Rollyo is blocked on the Learn.net, though, so it's off to Michael. Re Rollyo, I can't immediately think of anything in particular I'd use it for, but it possibly has some good uses for the website. We could again apply that librarianly talent for selection of trusted resources, and create 'mini-web' search engines for our public. For example, maybe we gather a handful of sites where teen books are reviewed, and make a search box for the Teen pages on our site. I guess in terms of functionality it might work a bit like the way on the Internet Movie Database you end up with a page full of movie trailers from different sites? Have to see how it works when it gets let past the WebMarshal sentinel.