I appreciate how straight-forward LibThing is; signing up was easy and adding books is easy. The search function could be a bit more refined and the default for the layout of my homepage was way cluttered. So I customized it and now it looks like this!
My books were not too popular...I mostly added children's titles, including the first book I remember reading:
Aw. I read a little about what LibraryThing hopes to be able to do for libraries and vice versa. I like LibraryThing for the same reason I like people's lists on Amazon: there are people out there that have my interests and tastes and seeing what they have and like is valuable to me. I think even patrons using the same library could benefit from reviews and ratings by their fellow readers. To me it's just more information, which I generally don't see as dangerous. Although I'm not sure how tags would fit in, since we already have keywords, and I'm sure we'd have to moniter content somehow if LT users reviews were going to show up in our OPAC.
I like the idea that there is a community feeling to seeing what other people have or have read...I think the best thing a library could do with LT is use it to reinforce that sense of community among people who use our library.
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