Thing #14: LibraryThing

I really enjoy LibraryThing and created a personal account a couple of years ago for my own collection. I've been looking for ways to publicize our great new books at DCTC, and we realized several months ago that we could use LibraryThing as a "virtual display case." My colleague created a widget that we placed on the Library home page. We feature a new subject area every month or so -- for example, for February we had Black History Month titles.

The way we do this is to add any books we want for our virtual display to our LibraryThing account, and for each featured subject area, I make sure to assign it that tag. Then my coworker puts all the entries for that particular tag into our display.

Here's a link to our home page, with our LibraryThing widget in the lower right.

http://dctclibrary.dctc.edu/

In answer to the blog prompt... Yes, I can imagine using LibraryThing to "push" book suggestions to a patron.

P.S. Just did an advanced option: added a widget to this blog. Hooray!