Thursday, April 12, 2007

Link soup morning

I've had a stack of links sitting in Bloglines for a while. Seems like today's a perfect day for Link Soup:

Quick, to the Book Cave! Having a 'cave' in the middle of a bookshelf wasn't quite what I thought that would be, but it's a fun idea, particularly for a teen reading area or a home library in a loft. Neat. (via LibraryStuff)

The Village Voice deconstructs 'the most popular song in America right now.' Any time Venn diagrams and flowcharts are used near the words "fly" and "hottt," you know it's going to be good. (via Seth Godin)

I've got an entire post on this topic brewing, but for now, here's one entry in the "If Libraries Don't Do It, A Business Will Do It For Us" category: LibraryThing for Libraries. I'm a fan of LT, though not a user so much, but things like this scare and thrill me at the same time. LibraryThing functionality on our stuffy library websites and online catalogs. Brilliant, but why didn't more of us come up with this on our own? (Hat tip to Hennepin and Charlotte-Mecklenburg County)

Also from LibraryThing: Will Libraries Die? Our competitor/allies are thinking about these things, and so should we be.

Finally, one from Walking Paper: The Future of Reading. References an Economist article and poses good questions about the future of books and libraries. Neat.

2 comments:

Tim said...

Update on LTFL—in place in Danvers, CT. ( http://www.librarything.com/thingology/2007/05/danbury-ct-kicks-off-librarything-for.php ). I hope it doesn't scare you more.

I started a thread on Code4Lib. It seems to be that LTFL shows how much you can do with existing OPACs--without even integrating on the back end. For a while now many have "punted" their OPAC dreams—"SOME day we'll have the OPACs we want!" I think that's a mistake. You can do more than you think.

Jennifer Koerber said...

Tim, that neither scares nor surprises me. Danbury has been pushing the envelope for a while, now, and I'm actually glad to see that they made it to the top of the LTFL pack. Their name recognition should help promote LTFL nation-wide. I'm really excited that you've got such a high-placed player showcasing your wares.

Over here, I'm sure that our Applications Manager is frothing at the mouth, eager to try LTFL. I should give him a buzz and make sure he sees the news about Danbury as a test case.

Thanks for the heads-up, and congrats!