Thing #11--About Technology

I use my computer every day. It's a life line, in some senses. But rather than write about the wonders of computer technology, I will use this forum to mention something that's been on my mind. If I had the time, I would write a scholarly paper critiquing LibraryThing. Now, I am an avid user of LibraryThing. In two accounts, I have downloaded almost 6,000 records in LT. But there are many problems with it. In short, it is merely user-focused and not book-focused. There is a lot of emphasis on the social aspect of book collecting, and the cataloging part of things gets short shrift. This is unfortunate because it would be technically easy for the LT people to give a little more attention to the cataloging side of things and the service would be vastly improved.

Here are just a couple of things that are not good with LT. As it is now, users are unable to input long titles. When I was entering original records for people's dissertations, this was very unfortunate. I had to put the full title down in the comments field, which was an unsatisfactory solution. For some dissertations, the title was meaningless unless all words of the 30-word title were input because the organism being discussed in the paper was not mentioned until the end. If they have server room for book covers, they certainly can allow filling in of the whole title. Also, the MARC record has become very difficult to locate in LT records (or have they finally made it unavailable altogether?). This affected my work because I was hoping to include subjects in the records, for collation of topics, and this is not possible unless you convert the subjects to tags, and that is not a straightforward proposition at all. Don't get me started on the inadequacy of the interface ...

Anyway, I could go on and on. LibraryThing is covered in the next Thing, so I will go on to that activity. I will just conclude by saying that they could improve the service in a hundred ways.

I have commented on Pam S.'s thoughtful "This is Pam" blog to round out the requirements for this assignment.

Side note: I made some lentil soup today, by the way. It was a nice, cool day for having it.