Week 8, Thing 19

Got an account at LibraryThing and added the books I've reviewed so far this summer for school. Create a widget. Here it is. Let's see if it works.


Other things - I looked at the LibraryThing for Libraries with the examples. I clicked on 4 or 5 of them and couldn't figure out for any of them where LibraryThing was being used. Maybe I just missed something.

I liked being able to load my books in since I was keeping them on a spreadsheet anyway. I'm wondering if you can keep private reviews on the books which I'd like to do. In the edit section, I saw something about comments but need to look at it further.

(Ok. Published post and the widget showed up. Yippee! But I notice that the textbox I added in my last post is creeping around on the blog and not staying in its original location. I also just noticed that the picture I put in Zoho got cut off on the right in addition to taking forever to load and the emoticon I put in not only disappear but so did the text that was originally there. Ah, technology)

I put 15 books in. All of them had other readers, ranging from 1 other to 562 others. Several had user reviews.

Still thinking about how I could integrate this into my school library. Because all books in the library have to go through a review process, I'm a bit nervous about opening up something that has no "age appropriateness" restraints on it. Although I personally think kids will read what they want and self-censor if it's not right for them, I'm not sure about defending some of the recommendations to parents. Perhaps because it's a 3rd party site and I don't have the books in the school library, I don't need to worry as much about it.

Ah! Just found a space in the book edit section for private comments. Looks like that's where I could keep my things. Another question - can you set it up to only make this information available to "friends"? It would be useful to set up a network of district librarians with access to comments about books that weren't necessarily available to others (including students).

Looks like "groups" might be the place to do this. You can set up a group that only specific people can access. Something to look into.
More good stuff.