Bedford Public Library adds LibraryThing for Libraries

The Bedford Public Library in Bedford, TX (town, Wikipedia) has become the second library to put LibraryThing for Libraries in their online catalog.

Trying out LTFL fits with Bedford's Public Libraries forward-looking stance, with free wifi, integration with Library ELF and other initiatives.

You can see LibraryThing for Libraries at work with books like:

• Divine secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood : a novel / Rebecca Wells.
• Gone with the wind / Margaret Mitchell

Both show our "semi-FRBR" edition-combination at work—cross-linking to large-print and audio editons—and our "similar books" algorithm, for finding other books you might want to read.

We are now also able to link to tag pages:

• Cyberpunk
• Cozy mysteries (my favorite newly-discovered genre)
• Ice Age (as opposed to the LCSH term "Glacial Epoch")
• Creative Writing (the LCSH is "authorship")

Of course, tags aren't the "answer," but just another way to find things, with different strengths. If tags bring Bedford's genre fiction holdings into high relief, it doesn't do as good a job with Texas history as their LCSH headings.

Some technical details. Bedford Public Library is another Innovative Interfaces Web OPAC catalog, like the first, the Danbury Public Library. Our third library will be one too. So it bears reminding that LibraryThing for Libraries works with any OPAC, and no better with Innovative's. We think it's spreading through them because people like to have a tangible example. That or it's the library equivalent of the Brazilian Internet Phenomenon.

Even though it was the same OPAC we took the time to make the CSS fit in perfectly with Bedford's design--a very different green-based one. Our chief LTFL engineer, Altay, is becoming quite a faker!