LibraryThing calls itself "the world's biggest book club." It is a big and busy social cataloging web application for sharing and storing your personal library catalog and book lists. You add books to your catalog by searching either Amazon, The Library of Congress, or one of the other 250 sources the site provides. Once a book is selected, you can review, rate, summarize, and tag the book. Since the site is a huge social network based on books, your books become linked to other people's books who share the same books or tags.
A practical use would be to select books and tag them for different disciplines or classes (creating sets), then share the these sets with your students. So if you are teaching classes on "English Literature of the Enlightenment" and "Commonwealth Literature" you could have one LibraryThing account and different sets for each class, depending on how you tagged the books.
To use LIbraryThing:
- Make an account.
- Add and tag books.
