I mentioned last week that Karen Burns had made a LibraryThing account for the Shenandoa Public Library, so they could use the blog widget to display new books on their website.

Since then, Karen has set up a bunch of other libraries in her area with LT accounts and widgets for their websites, including: The Atlantic Public Library, The Gibson Memorial Library/Creston Public Library, Southwestern Community College LRC, Anita Public Library, and SWILSA’s own site.

Today, Karen posted a podcast about how she’s been using LibraryThing widgets on library webpages.

Another librarian doing some similar cool stuff with LT is John Klima, who created a LibraryThing account which he uses to recommend books on the teen page of his library’s website (the header of his widget reads “Recommended Books from the YA Librarian”).

In short, we love it. Using the LT widgets like this is clever. It’s eye-catching (who doesn’t like a book cover?) and current (if you choose 5 most recent books added to your LT catalog, for example, it will automatically update on your widget when you add a new book to LT) – all in all, a good way for libraries to show off their new books.

What else? Do you know of any other libraries using LT? I’d love to hear about it.

We think LibraryThing can do even more for libraries. Tim’s been begging libraries to let show you LT data (tags, rating, covers, reviews, etc.) in an OPAC. (WITHOUT fooling around with the OPAC, and without any “technical” help at all. It would all be a short-term “enhanced” mirror on LibraryThing’s servers.) He’s looking in particular to play around with Innovative Interfaces Millennium OPACs, so shoot him an email if you want to join in the fun.

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