Richard Hugo House catalog on Librarything.com

Richard Hugo House (RHH) in Seattle in a non-profit organization for readers and writers. Part of the house is dedicated to a small, non-circulating library open to members of the house only. Recently RHH moved their entire catalog from Microsoft Access to Library Thing. In part, because the Access file was corrupted and also partly because library thing allows users to view the catalog from outside of the library. I’m interested more in thinking about the effectiveness of using Library Thing as an OPAC than in evaluating Library Thing as a whole.

One of the major weaknesses of Hugo House’s plans is that there is no link directly from the website to the catalog. The only information on the site is on the library web page with a link to the FAQ (a Word document) for using the catalog. Perhaps the staff made this choice intentionally to encourage users to read the FAQ before beginning their search but it does make it difficult to actually access the catalog.

Library Thing is a relatively easy program to use once members do access the catalog. They have the option of changing the view though the library staff chooses which fields are shown in each view and not the users. Members can also view the social information for each title and get recommendations based on titles in the catalog. This information is gathered from multiple sources and the site generates up to six lists of recommendations based on tags and social information.

The tags were entered by library volunteers but seem to follow a strict order throughout. However, the information included in the tags is limited and pertains only to the call number assigned by the library and the name of the section. For example, the tags for Norman Mailer’s work The Spooky Art are “060MAI, writing/publishing resources, 060, writing life, Norman Mailer.” This helps users link to other books in a section but it doesn’t allow for very complex searches. This means that users will be most successful when doing a known-item search.

The collection at RHH also includes nearly 150 scripts donated by the University of Washington as well as several videos and cassette tapes. Because Library Thing was created to list books, adding other types of materials can be awkward and time-consuming.

Using Library Thing for the OPAC at RHH is a good idea in many ways. First of all, it’s cheap. Library Things charges just $15 per year for non-profits (up to 3,000 books). The service also allows RHH to show non-members what they collect which may spark interest from other Library Thing users. The program works well but as an OPAC more steps could be taken to increase the ease with which users search and navigate the catalog.