#anz23mthings Thing 10 Social reading

Over time I have investigated a few different book and reading sites. Bookjetty, LibraryThing and Goodreads stand out amongst the ones I have used most. And I think ultimately the choice depends on what you are mainly using the tool for.

These days I use Goodreads regularly and not any of the others.  I don't want to catalogue my books at home. The non-fiction is arranged in broad DDC categories and the fiction is in a bit of a jumble but all in the one bookshelf and it needs weeding. Most of my new purchases are ebooks and I can search for them in their apps.

What I want a reading tool for is primarily to monitor my own reading and to have social interactions with followers and authors.  So I decided a few years ago that Goodreads was the one I wanted to use.  I have nearly 300 friends from a range of backgrounds and covering most elements of my life. I can't ever keep up with what they are reading but I like to see their opinions about new books getting added to my to-read shelf. We don't always agree but that doesn't matter. 

I mostly use the Goodreads app on my iPhone and have it linked to report to other social media about my reading progress. I usually find the books I am reading on there but have occasionally had to catalogue a title not already present.  However, some times I just don't bother recording those titles.

I set an annual target for my reading on Goodreads but I keep it very modestly at 52.  I know people who read 365 a year but I am not really interested in doing that.  I just really want to keep a record of my reading as proof to me that I really still do it.



And therein lies a problem. I really like re-reading books. But if I re-read books the re-reads are not counted towards my annual target as the books still have their original completion date.  I have got around this in previous years by adding shelves called "read-2012" etc.  Or at least I had thought I had. However, this year I have had a real difficulty.

Elizabeth Peters

I reread a whole swag of Elizabeth Peters' books last summer in sweltering, can't do anything heat. So they are counted in my read-2013 shelf.  However, quite late in the year when I was ill and with my cotton-wool head barely capable of reading, I picked up a well-read Elizabeth Peters.  Of course, that didn't get counted either in my target or in my read-2013 shelf as it was already there once. And it got worse. After I had read that book, I went to Elizabeth Peters' site to identify the other books in the series. And I discovered that she had died. So I then reread a swag of her books which I had already reread in January 2013. This means that to calculate my annual reads I need to add the number of these books to the number of the books in my read-2013 shelf.

These calculations are not beyond me, but I really do wish that computers could do the stats for me.  It also really under-estimates the number of books read in Goodreads annual targets IMO.  Or maybe others don't re-read books?  Do you re-read? In total, I read (including re-reads) at least 106 books last year. I say at least as I think here were some others that weren't on file.  I am very happy with that as I had set a target of 52 books, the same as I have now set for 2014.

Goodreads with its iphone app is a tool that I use practically daily and a great example of a mobile tool. You can check out my Goodreads profile here.  Please feel free to add me as your friend.  I am always happy to have more.

#54 Bookjetty - your books, your libraries!

I became familiar with Bookjetty at the VALA conference this year when Singapore's Schubert Foo mentioned this home-grown tool in his keynote address. I was immediately struck by the difference between Bookjetty and other book sites, namely that you could search library catalogues as well as bookshops. I set myself the post-conference task of looking into it properly and seeing if we could get Boroondara's catalogue up on the site. Well, we succeeded in that and our users can now use Bookjetty to search our library catalogue (along with others) and easily link to the site to place a reservation.

LibraryThing also now has access to library catalogues for searching. They weren't able to do this last time I used them, but I did say they were going from strength to strength! Thanks to Casey from LibraryThing for pointing this out to me. However, the standout thing for me about Bookjetty from the minute I saw it demonstrated by Dr Foo was the federated searching capability. At Bookjetty, you select your favourite libraries from a list and your item will be searched for on these simultaneously, rather than you having to go to each catalogue. As three of Boroondara's neighbouring libraries, Stonnington, Monash and Darebin, are now accessible via Bookjetty, this provides a useful local federated search facility. It will be interesting to see how Bookjetty continues to develop.

#46 Updates!

Thing 46 is a chance to review the changes made with a number of Things since they were first written up almost a year before this task #46. As the Victorian public libraries Learning 2.0 was happening about the time or just before these updates were being written up, I didn't find that there was all that much that was new for me here. The Things that were updated and/or commented upon were #3 Blogger, #5 Flickr, #8 Bloglines, #9 RSS feeds, #10 Generator, #11 LibraryThing, #12 Rollyo, #13 De.licio.us and #14 Technorati. However, it is useful to have these updates for when we want to roll out the original 23 things to the next group of staff.

Interestingly the majority of these are ones that I still use daily or at least on a regular basis and many the ones that Michael Stephens talked about in his talk last week. These have all become pretty mainstream now, it appears. It's hard to believe it, but it is really so. Tempus fugit.

I was interested in Flickr's partnership with Picnik which I must have passed over (though it should have come up in the Picnik thing), and the fact that LibraryThing offer a facility to scan titles not on their database. That sounds good to me as I find it very frustrating not being able to add new items in Bookjetty (they say next release....). It was also interesting to see the comment about the role of Facebook in social cataloguing. I guess I had noticed it with the various books and reading applications but I hadn't really thought it out.

Life after #23?

I think that I have been having withdrawal symptoms since the end of Learning 2.0. I have missed the intensity of learning and the excitement of experimenting with new things. I haven't been wasting my time, however. I have spent quite a bit of time going back and exploring things that we touched on in the course. I have explored Flickr, its emailing, and its networks and in the course of this have found some great photos and struck up a correspondence with someone about Collingwood's history, as well as communicating with people I know virtually and physically. I have explored LibraryThing a bit more and signed up for some of the book discussions. I am still monitoring them via Bloglines but I don't really think that it is for me. I use Bloglines and del.icio.us regularly still and occasionally glance at Technorati. I have also been intending to get on with setting up some wikis on some historical topics, starting with Boroondara's hotels, but I haven't quite got there yet.

But the really exciting thing I have been spending my time on is Ning. Fiona introduced me to this and we have set up a Ning network for City of Boroondara Library Service. You can see the link to it on the side panel. To date, the network is pretty embryonic with Fiona, Jonathan and me rattling around in it. However, we have had some good discussions particularly around Christmas books and will no doubt have more as we encourage more people to join in the New Year. Today I have been experimenting with setting up a Ning network for Hawthorn's history - again the link to it is in the badge on the side bar.

One side effect of poking around in Ning was that I discovered the Learning 2.1 Ning network and discovered that indeed there is life after Learning 2.0. It is Learning 2.1 and there are many more things to learn. Apart from the Learning 2.1 Ning network, there is also a Learning 2.1 blog as well as a Learning 2.1 wiki which I notice several Australians have already registered on. I have been spending too much time on Ning today, but my brave new world will start soon and I will embark on #24! How exciting! Helene Blowers may have moved on to Ohio, but this program continues and continues to have an amazing world-wide effect on libraries of all types.

#11 All about LibraryThing

This is a fun tool. It certainly is easy to catalogue books! I just added a few that came to mind or were lying around; it was interesting to see the range of records that came up. I chose ones with covers as I wanted to display them on my website. As you can see I also uploaded a list of my recent books to the side of my Blog. There were lots of things to do in this book community - apart from cataloguing books, one could blog, review, etc. My library is at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Polyxena.