Tim Spalding on Social Cataloging, Libraries & the Open Web

What is Social Cataloging? (LIANZA09) from Tim Spalding on Vimeo.

Tim Spalding, the founder of Library Thing, discusses LibraryThing, personal and social cataloging, LibraryThing for libraries, building community and the open web. I went from perceiving him as an executive/publicist to recognizing his perspective as innovative and in touch with how libraries might better interface with the open web to serve patrons.

As Tim discussed various ways librarians could use LibraryThing, I was reminded of a visit to my local public library where a woman was told her reading wishlist had been wiped as it would be from time to time. It turned out that she'd only had it for a month or two and was supposed to expect such instability due to a warning regarding periodic data purges.

This situation, in which a libary is poorly supporting a service that could be accessed for free online via such companies as LibraryThing, is a strong example of what happens when a closed web approach encounters a problem that's readily solvable via the open web. Unfortunately, in this case, an unhappy patron who was now less inclined to use the library's own web services was the result.