I’ve finally gotten around to reading John Wenzler’s short article on LibraryThing for Libraries (LTFL).

The idea of adding tagging to our catalogue has come up before, but we’ve not yet acted on it. That may, in part, be because prior to LibraryThing for Libraries, it was largely do-it-yourself. (Which can be quite cool–see Ann Arbor District Library’s catalogue–but also takes time.) LTFL simplifies that to uploading a list of ISBNs and configuring and installing a LibraryThing widget for your catalogue. LTFL also stores the user-applied tags outside of the catalogue, which makes me happy (I am a cataloguer, after all…) and feeds up other titles from the library’s collection that the user might like.

I had a look at the two examples Wenzler talks about, Danbury Public Library and San Francisco State University. Both incorporate the LibraryThing tags pretty seamlessly, and I found elements of both that I liked. Danbury Public has the LT tags appear on the item display provided when you click on a title, which I preferred. SFSU’s catalogue puts them on a second-layer Details tab that the user has to click into.

Both catalogues incorporate the usual growing and shrinking font sizes to indicate frequency of tag use. To be honest, I found this distracting, though less so in the SFSU catalogue. I’m not sure if this is just a difference in page layout or if the relative font sizes are different between the two. Would be interesting to know. I also wonder how users would respond if all the tags were the same size.