Koha vs. LibraryThing

D. Between last Thursday's work at the Family Support Network (FSN) and today many emails have been exchanged and conversations had. First I conversed with my advisor, Beth about my nervousness about KOHA and its technical demands. Her suggestion was to try to find an IT person in the FSN building to install koha on the server for me. After that Dr. Bird emailed me suggesting that using LibraryThing could be a better solution to manage FSN's collection. She sent me three articles to read. Today I spent about 1.5 hours reading those articles and looking up supplemental research on LibraryThing.


For those who many not know, LibraryThing is a social cataloging website. You can enter a personal or organizational collection into the website and share it with others, thereby seeing other's library collections as well. You can enter 200 items for free, or pay a small fee for a yearly or lifetime membership. I personally use LibraryThing and therefore was familiar with it when Dr. Bird suggested it, however my further research today has provided many other good reasons why LibraryThing would be a better option for FSN.

E. Today's emotion was excitement! When Dr. Bird first suggested LibraryThing I remembered thinking about using it at the very beginning but being worried that it wasn't "high-tech" or sophisticated enough, or "librariany" enough. I felt that perhaps using Librarything would be a cop-out choice, the easy way out of a difficult situation. However as I did more research today my mood began to improve. Using LibraryThing to manage FSN's collection would definitely be easier then learning to use KOHA, but additionally my research finding prove that it also could be much much more useful. The different features that LibraryThing has (that I describe some of below) would in my opinion provide better service to FSN and the families it serves without the technical hassles that koha has. I feel that my personal agenda has been modified, because a couple days ago I felt that LibraryThing was not "worthy" of consideration because of its easy and lack of technical requirements. However being a true information service provider and 'consultant' in this case doesn't mean giving them something fancy that they definitely could not have done on their own, it means giving them something that would be the best fit for their situation.
AL. Most of what I learned today dealt with the amazingness of LibraryThing. Although it is geared towards personal and small organizational collections, the more I learned about it, the more it seemed to fit the needs and wants of the Family Support Network. First, it is accessible from anywhere and already online. There is no technical overhead and no server space needed. Copy cataloging can be done from Amazon, the Library of Congress or bunches of other libraries, it can be used in different languages (which FSN will like because some of their families are native Spanish speakers). Also LibraryThing has the code for a widget which can put a catalog search box directly on a website. You can add information about FSN and link FSN to the local community, which can help them meet other families who many need their services. Also if families use this catalog they can directly see reviews and suggestions for other books they may like which can help to give these families more information about the disease or disorder their child has been diagnosed with.

The only downside is that there is a price, $25 for a lifetime membership. And one area that I will have to work with Kelly and Sandra about it the searching capabilities. LibraryThing searches your catalog by title, author, ISBN or tags. So I need to work with my directors to make sure that we create great tags that will be the topics that families are likely to search for, so that they can easily find what information and resources they need.