1. Social Cataloguing
By Jessie Buckley

2. What is Social Cataloguing?“
Sites whose primary purpose is the cataloguing of material owned by its members (books, DVDs, music), while also building a community of users with that shared interest. Above and beyond the standard cataloguing, users build up a vast quantity of social data around the records, such as reviews, recommendations, ratings and tags.
Rawson, J. 2011, ‘Social Cataloguing’, Socialoxfordlibs [wiki], Retrieved: 23 May 2011, From
A term that isn’t clearly defined as it is decribes a technology that’s constantly evolving – often interchangable with other web 2 term like user tagging, social tagging, and social bookmarking
But I thought this quote from an oxford libraries wiki explained it really well
Today I will focus on Social cataloguing sites and applications dealing with books, as I am looking at how they have affected libraries ”

3. Social Cataloguing sites
LibraryThing
Goodreads
Shelfari
aNobii
Bookjetty
weRead
Visual bookshelf
LibraryThing – started 2006
Goodreads – 2006
aNobii – comes from latin for bookworm, founded 2006
Shelfari – started 2006 taken over by Amazon.com 2008
Bookjetti – over 300 libraries in 100 countries
weRead – application via Facebook, MySpace,
Visual bookshelf – part of a group of social cataloguing applications (Livingsocial) on Facebook

4. Common Features Search for/add books Tagging Rate/review
Recommendations/connections
Friends/groups
Search – using Amazon, Library catalogues
Some sites allow scanning of barcodes – with wand or phone
Tagging – assigning keywords to item – helps to group similar items
Rate/review – usually star rating out of 5, read and share reviews with others
Recommendations – manually recommend to friends, automatic recommendations/connections to books similar to yours/people with similar taste
Friends/groups – most allow adding of friends, newsfeed when friends add books, groups for people to discuss books, genres, authors etc.
Many authors are on sites

5. LibraryThing Founded by Tim Spalding, May 2006
More than a Million members
More than 62 Million books
700 sources
Free to catalog 200 books
Thingamabrarians
Tim Spalding – worked in publishing and claims he “invented” the term “social cataloguing”
Not the biggest – Goodreads more than 5 Mill. Members & 150 Mill. books
Sources include Library of Congress, all Amazon sites– 47 countries – 35 languages
$10 year or $25 lifetime account = endless number of books

6. How are libraries using it?
To promote new books
To promote library (LibraryThing Local)
Adding social features to catalogue (LibraryThing for libraries)
Promote – widget cover art , links on their website to LibraryThing
LibraryThing for libraries – 1,616 libraries - 44 Australian libraries or library groups