Tuesday Thingers - September 2, 2008

For those who wonder, Tuesday Thingers is a weekly meme for users of LibraryThing who blog. Question from Boston Bibliophile:

Members who have your books. Do you ever look at this feature? Do you use it to make LT friends, or compare notes? There are three tabs- weighted, raw, and recent. “Weighted,” which means “weighted by book obscurity and library size” is probably the least self-explanatory of the three, whereas “raw” and “recent” are more so. Do you get any kind of use out of this feature?

I do look at the future. I have actually found some fellow genealogists that I know through the said feature. I will almost always browse the libraries of my fellow genealogists to see if they have some book of which I'd been previously unaware. I then might try to order that book if it is something that I really really need for my personal research or I might add it to a wish list to order. My Amazon.com wish list is getting really really long thanks to LibraryThing.

I do pay attention to all three tabs, but I probably pay the most attention to weighted simply because it is the default. When I get bored with seeing the same folks in the list, I check the others. I really do like the "recent" feature because it shows new LibraryThing folks with similar interests or people who've recently been adding a lot of books with similar libraries.

My largest categories are history and genealogy, cookery, and mystery. The people who tend to show up at the top of my list are fellow mystery lovers. I get a lot of genealogists in the top 50, but it is understandable that they are not at the very top of my list because of the size of my collection and because genealogists tend to collect heavily in places that are important to their own personal research. I'm really glad to have the matches I do have with genealogists.

Do I add them to my friends? No. Most of the time I just add them to my interesting libraries or to my private watch list if I really want to keep track of their new additions. I have added very few recently because we now get automatic recommendations based on the top 50 libraries in our weighted score. I have corresponded with a few people, but it's pretty rare.