Two more libraries have added LibraryThing for Libraries:

Waterford Institute of Technology (catalog) in Waterford in south east Ireland. WIT becomes our first academic library, and our first one outside the US. Apart from that, we were particularly happy to get the ball up and rolling. WIT’s David Kane and I have been corresponding for some time, and quite profitably. Long before LibraryThing for Libraries, he tried to bolt our recommendations onto the WIT catalog. His solution—functional but requred real-time scraping of the WIT catalog—threw the technical challenges of LibraryThing for Libraries in high relief. David was also intrumental in setting up my keynote at the Irish Innovative Users Group. David’s current passion is the WIT Institutional Repository, about which he gave a talk at the IIUG.

It’s good to see LibraryThing for Libraries operating in a different context. While something like romance comes up fairly light at WIT, their holdings in tags like engineering and programming dazzle, and really give our suggestion algorithms a work-out!

Deschutes Public Library of Deschutes County in Oregon. Our largest library so far! Deschutes has five branches serving 140,000 patrons, in the fastest growing area of Oregon. They have quite a broad collection, but my eye was drawn to Why cats paint : a theory of feline aesthetics, which suggests mostly cat books, of course.

Labels: librarything for libraries, ltfl libraries