Library Thing and World Cat

Library Thing is a quick and easy way of cataloguing books, people use it to catalogue their own books or books they would like to read. Some groups put up records for their books. Authors and publishers also have a presence on the site. Their are some neat features including recommendations of books to read based on what you have catalogued and lists of who else has your books. You can share your library and conversely you can meet new people through the site by contacting those who have similar reading interests to your own. You can add tags, books covers, recommendations, ratings stars, and common knowledge information such as quotes, awards and honors, people and characters, book description to the books. Their are group forums and blogs and details of local libraries, book stors and book events. Book covers can be selected from those already on Library Thing or you can upload your own. Copy cataloguing information is added to your library from those titles already on Library Thing or by searching a list of major libraries your national library or search from for your local library's holdings. I found it quick and easy to use. Library Thing for Libraries pulls over provides a similar service for libraries sitting alongside your library OPAC running parallel with it.
WorldCat is OCLC's open catalogue and a competitor of LibraryThing for Libraries you can make lists, add tags, write reviews and find locations as an individual. It is much more than LibraryThing offering library management system. To get the product you need to subscribe to FirstSearch which includes the Wilson indexes. FirstSearch provides links from citations in one databse to full text articles in another and can fully integrate search results to your OPAC. Worldcat provides a whole cloud based operating system for libraries of which a really tantalizing feature is their interlibrary loan module.
Both Library Thing and WorldCat are ways of exposing your catalogue to the web rather than remaining in the deep web. As these two are competitors it would seem these two cannot co-exist in the same library system. WorldCat has a no third party plugins policy. Libraries need to balance the concerns raised by loosing control of data through OCLC control against the convenience of the product. WorldCat works with an EBSCO agregator to provide integrated searches of its articles enabling you to do a single search box.
Todays Library Library Liason session showed New Zealand applications of Library Thing for Libraries at Palmerston North and Nelson Public Library also AquaBrowser as used by Wellington and Auckland Public Libraries, Massey University as we have seen have Encore Summon was also mentioned.
Mentioned in passing where Facebook's Visual Bookshelf, Goodreads and Shelfari which are similar in concept to Library Thing. Project Gutenburg, the Internet archive and Open Library one page for everybook where also touched on.
Christchurch City Libraries is contemplating the future of our unsupported catalogue, some decisions on the route we will take towards a more open catalgue are just around the corner.