Using Gurulib

So in the short time since my last post I have exported my LibraryThing database, created a Gurulib account, made a screen dump and saved it as a jpeg file and am currently importing my LibraryThing books into Gurulib. Easy!

Initially I didn't think it was going to work - look at the page I got. Check out how long until it thinks it'll have downloaded the stuff (6 days, 23 hours, 56 minutes, 57 seconds)!!!

Budge over LibraryThing, but to where?

I started adding books to Good Reads yesterday. It's quite easy to use but it doesn't have any tagging or any other indexing facility that I can see and I can't quite cope with that (spending too much time with the bearded one me thinks). I'd like something where I can have the already reads, the currently reading and the will-read-when-I-can in separate categories. I'd like something I can tag.

The Fiction_L list has come up trumps again with mention of an article called Social Sites for Book Lovers which very usefully appraises several sites. The author comes down in favour of Shelfari. It doesn't mention Gurulib though which I liked previously because it allows you to enter other media like DVDs and music. The article mentions that you can export your lists from one library to the other - makes life a whole lot easier and a little less tied to the computer.

I think at this stage, I'm going to abandon Good Reads and look at Shelfari and Gurulib again.

Oooh, I hate having to make choices.

Budge over LibraryThing

Peeps, I've stumbled across another record your books thing. This one is called Good Reads.

An American librarian, Patti, wrote about it on the Fiction_L list. I'm sure she won't mind me showing you what her Good Reads page looks like here. As you can see you don't just record what you have read, you can list what you'd like to read - for me sitting down here in Cataloguing, with all that yummy new fiction coming across my desk, that list gets bigger every day.

There's a networking element to this one too so you can see what your friends are reading. Might send you an email sometime soon?

I'm off to give it a go and will then add another widget gadget.

Week 7 And so the story ends in the LibraryThing

And was it an anticlimax? Not at all. LibraryThing was the best part of this week's exercise.

As noted before I've had a LibraryThing account for some time and have kept a list of what I have read since opening the account. Maybe I should also go back and add what's on the shelves at home that I haven't read for a while. And the kid's reading??

After admiring them for some time on staff blogs by High Altitude and Snow, I was especially thrilled to finally learn how to add the LibraryThing widgets to my blog. And aren't there a lot to choose from, one could go mad. And I added a "chiclet". Go me.

Go search my LIbraryThing - does it hurt? NB: It only seems to like one search term at a time, a search for "Ian Rankin" brings up Ian McEwan too???

I had a quick look at Shelfari and Gurulib too. Shelfari is aesthetically more pleasing perhaps than LibraryThing but appears to be no different otherwise. Looking at the sample library on Gurulib, it seems to allow you to add music, films/DVDs, games and software too which I haven't seen in LibraryThing. I might have chosen it first if I'd seen it. It's also aesthetically pleasing and has Wishlist and Recommended sections.

How long will it take me to move my LibraryThing collection do you think? Too long I suspect.

Week 7 The technocratical bit commences. . .

So you can look up a blog on Technocrati? Not sure why I would use it again, although it's interesting to know it's there. Perhaps.

I'm very excited about this though: I did a search for Readers in the Mist (advanced search - all of the words). click on the Blogs tab and RITM comes up.

See we have Authority 2? "Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has. It is important to note that we measure the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority. Of course, new links mean the +1 will last another 180 days." (Tecnocrati Support FAQ)

Clicking on Authority 2 you see which blogs have made mention of RITM or posts from RITM. You can see we get a little bit of coverage. Including links from Iain Banks' website/blog (or Iain M Banks if he's writing Fantasy) - excellent Scottish author by the way.

Fame!

To report on the Discover #2 thing - I had the same results with 'bookmobile' as others did - same results for general search, all words search and just one more for exact phrase search. No blogs result and 40 for tagged. So?

Couldn't find anything for nswpl2008 except under blogs tag. Maybe the blog should've been registered? How do you do that though? Yet another login and password?

Off to do the last wee bit - LibraryThing.

Week 7 The yummy plot so far . . .

OK. I've got as far as creating a
Heidi del.icio.us account and have populated it with two links which I have also put in to two 'bundles', all tagged and ready for action.

I didn't download the Extensions thing today because our system wouldn't allow it and I haven't worked out where I go back in to do it were I to do it from home in order to "make it easier to access your del.icio.us account and add new bookmarks." Without the Extensions it seems easy enough to do so how much easier can it get? Maybe I'll investigate and report back on that one?

After the blogs and Flickr and YouTube and the likes, del.icio.us seems very plain and pedestrian. Where's the bit where we get to put in pictures and stuff? I can see how it can be very useful in the library environment. The National Library del.icio.us page was interesting and a great resource for reference. Do we use it, or start our own internal one, or a bit of both?

On looking at the Cleveland Public Library site, I thought del.icio.us would be a great way for us here at BMCL to get around having to inform our IT department when we come across a great site we want to add to the Recommended sites pages of the BMCC website. But then I noted that each link went to a different CPL site - that just seems counter-productive to me.

I'm not keen on the tagging at del.icio.us. In Blogger tags are separated by a comma so multi-word tags are possible, eg. Books and Reading in Readers in the Mist. In Flickr you put your multi-word tags within inverted commas ("Springwood Colquhouns"). I don't like the underscore that some people are using, (United_Kingdom) so I have taken to running words together (BooksandReading). It'll have to do.

Now, which of my myriad Internet Explorer Favourites do I want open to public scrutiny? Hmmmmm.

Am feeling a bit overloaded at this stage and will look at the networking bit after lunch - or perhaps even next week.

And there's still Technorati to look at. Luckily I've been using LibraryThing for a while now (love it) so that cuts down the work a bit. What a full on session Week 7 is.