More Things- Nbr 35 Books

This will be my third and final post on Thing Nbr 35. Certainly it will not be my last visit to items found in the Learn reading list.

Library Thing looks promising for creating a book catalog. The rest of the content, as well as other social catalog services of the kind, are variations on apps I started using on Facebook. weRead was my first. Overbooked Ning is my favorite, and may be the best way to organize a small online book club.

This weekend I registered on Bookarmy. I used the search function to load 39 titles from my own shelves. I published reviews of three of my books. I began socializing by oversubscribing to several like-minded forums, and providing feedback to the developers of the site.

I skipped books on your phone. Can't imagine it.

Reading Trails is like the way I choose books to read. The Browse Tags is useful.

The Book Calendar daily feed looks interesting. It would go along with a link to the New York Times best sellers. I read USA Today best sellers lists every week.

Living Social, as I use it on Facebook, has an unfortunate tie to IQ Quizes, which can easily cost you $19.95 a month for an unintended cell phone subscription. Only the fine print tells you the cost and how to avoid it.

Podcasts are the way to go for audio books, although tapes and cd's are still popular. I don't do that.

Book Swap would be useful if you can localize it to your own community.

I think one of the most supportive things a small town library or a branch library can do is host a book club. There are two in Silver Bay. One keeps the library open after hours one Monday night a month. The other meets off site. Six to ten members is sustainable. Some members walk to a meeting, others drive an hour to get there. The same people who show up for book club often volunteer for everything in the community. The active community is wide and influential, and becomes a justification for library support by the city and county. We need the Arrowhead Library System to get ten copies of the same popular title at once.

I have a peeve about the search schemes provided by online book clubs. The book cover graphics and publishers are not the same as the ones on my shelf. If you were a commercial seller hoping for a hit on the edition you are selling, I skew the statistics by selecting the first cover that appears. Seriously, some of my favorite editions are long out of print. Dog-eared or not, they are classics. The volume of Tennyson poems I borrowed from the Duluth Central Library probably should have been secured in a rare books room. The illustrations were that good.

Netflix is great not only for ordering and rating movies, but sharing with family and friends, and for adding content to My Yahoo or iGoogle.

CatVids is a costly software package that catalogs any kind of media, including archived hardware. It's rich in features you would recognize in web 2.0; links to capture an online album cover or a film trailer; stores whatever data element you want in a standard database field or a freeform field of your own creation. Search with boolean logic, or sort and browse pages of records. Anyone can use it without fear of breaking something. It's great for a nonprofit wide area network, but how would you port thousands of records to something better on the web?

Over ten years ago, my wife and I were part of a team that used CatVids to catalog the entire Baha'i Media Services collection at the House of Worship in Wilmette, IL. Several thousand items were relabeled with a numbering scheme that pinpointed their location, whether they were in use on someone's desk or in the rafters of the archives. The staff was there to help; an archivist, an IT professional to set up file sharing, producers, editors, supervisors, and volunteer library professionals from around the country. I customized the application to meet staff requirements. None of that crowd can be described in plural today, because of severe budget cuts. The system outlived the missing, and is maintained by two or three people. We'll return as volunteers to clean it up.