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4 February 2008
LibraryThing gets serious press coverage
Posted by Richard Wallis at February 4, 2008 04:56 PM
The Saturday edition of The Wall Street Journal covered the library world's social cataloguing poster child - LibraryThing.
The occasion was the announcement that Powell's Books became the sixth and biggest bookstore to list its books on the site. In a few short years LibraryThing has grown from the personal catalogue of its founder Tim Spalding, to the social cataloguing site containing 23 million books with 350,000 members.
Since the beginning of the year, the LibraryThing blog has been busily announcing things like 13 law libraries and 22 science and technology libraries now available as sources to search when cataloguing your books. Long gone are the days when you could only expect to find books that are available on Amazon catalogued in LibraryThing. We at Talis were proud to be the subject of the first announcement in the 2008 batch of announcements, when Tim revealed the benefits of a partnership between LibraryThing and Talis, making the many millions of titles catalogued by British Library and within the Talis Union available as sources (as I discussed at the time).
I believe there are still a few in the world of libraries who are not aware of the LibraryThing phenomenon. Pay attention who ever you are, as well as a success story LibraryThing is a great example of the way the work of librarians can help provide value to people across the planet - but not necessarily in the way those librarians imagined it.
