One of the most mind-blowing things about Library 2.0 is the push to bring all the world’s literature together in — or at least accessible from — a single place. Tim Spalding is one of the pioneers of this mission. He is the creator of “LibraryThing” (http://www.librarything.org), a web site that invites everyone in the world to catalog his or her own books on the site to be shared with the rest of the world. Based on a user-entered identifier, such as ISBN, LibraryThing pulls metadata from Amazon and library catalogs from the Library of Congress, universities, and other institutions across the globe. The service thus strives to maintain “library-quality” while leveraging social tagging. Many bibliophiles have embraced the idea wholeheartedly, cataloging their personal book collections with relish. The Web 2.0 social aspects of the system allow users with similar reading tastes to find each other for online conversation. Book reviews can be posted, too. LT is not only for individual users, however. Some libraries use LibraryThing widgets to announce new books on their web sites. Publishers are even offering advance copies of new books to LibraryThing users to review.
Consistent with the theme of this blog, we now ask, what does LibraryThing, mean for law libraries? At present, not much. Its flavor is decidedly more popular than legal, and most libraries known to use it are public. Not surprisingly, a search for tags of a legal nature, e.g., “legal,” turn up lots of hits for Grisham and Turow novels. Selecting a tag like “jurisprudence” or “constitutional law” improves things. However, the results are sparse and casebooks and study guides are dominant. At present, the service is clearly more popular with law students than practitioners, legal academics, or law librarians. The potential for growth as a tool for the legal community is there, however. If the service becomes more popular with the law community, it might be useful as an acquisition and marketing tool for law librarians and as a legal research tool for students, legal academics and practitioners. As of this writing, twenty LibraryThing users have identified themselves as being law librarians, but use by members of this group appears to be exclusively personal. It would be interesting to see whether a “LawLibraryThing” would take off a few law libraries began to use LibraryThing widgets to announce new books. Any takers out there?
