Elizabeth Thomsen was kind enough to let us reprint her take
on the ubiquitous lists over on Amazon.com
\”Have you seen the customer-generated booklists on Amazon\’s
website?
They pop up all over the place– for example, if you do a
search on
\”Architecture,\” in addition to the hits, you\’ll also see a
\”Listmania\”
column with several lists contributed by customers. The
customer gets
to select the items they want included in their list, and to
add their
own comments for each item. When the list is displayed,
there are links
to add the item to your shopping cart or wish list.
Anything currently
available through Amazon (including videos, toys, etc.) can
be included,
and the system automatically removes unavailable items.\”
Much More…..
Elizabeth Thomsen was kind enough to let us reprint her take
on the ubiquitous lists over on Amazon.com
\”Have you seen the customer-generated booklists on Amazon\’s
website?
They pop up all over the place– for example, if you do a
search on
\”Architecture,\” in addition to the hits, you\’ll also see a
\”Listmania\”
column with several lists contributed by customers. The
customer gets
to select the items they want included in their list, and to
add their
own comments for each item. When the list is displayed,
there are links
to add the item to your shopping cart or wish list.
Anything currently
available through Amazon (including videos, toys, etc.) can
be included,
and the system automatically removes unavailable items.\”
Much More…..
There are hundreds of lists, on all sorts of subjects and
themes, and,
not surprisingly, some are excellent and others are, well,
amateurish.
But looking through these reminded me again of how many
people love
recommending books to each other, and compiling booklists.
It\’s work
for people who work for libraries, but a lot of avid readers
seem to be
just jumping at the chance to do this for pleasure.
Which makes me think about how maybe this is something
libraries should
be doing, providing our patrons an opportunity to create
annotated lists
of their favorites and share them with others. I\’ll bet
that certain
people in every community would really love this, and would
spend some
time setting up lists on their favorite topics, and that
some of these
people would even build up a local following. And, of
course, if a
library were doing this, every title on the list would be
linked to the
web catalog. I can see whole school classes doing lists
like this, and
members of various reading groups– really, this could be
fun for anyone
who wants a chance to be the local Oprah!
Are any of the library system vendors providing similar
list-making
interfaces? The interface should let the patron mark titles
they want
to include from the web catalog, give them an interface to
number and
rearrange them and a space to input their annotations, and
to store the
lists on the library server. If necessary, lists could be
suppressed until approved. The lists could be available
through some
interface that\’s an index by list-maker and title, at least
at first,
and integrated into search results pages the way Amazon has
done.
And, as is true with Amazon, each list would have its own
URL, so
patrons pleased with their lists could e-mail the URL to
their friends,
add this to their own websites, etc. People have a lot of
fun making
and sharing these booklists– wouldn\’t it be great if our
local people
got into making and sharing lists that all pointed back into
our library
catalogs?
Of course there are all kinds of issues that would have to
be worked
out, but I\’d like to know if anyone knows if their vendor is
working on
this. It\’s interesting (and depressing) to see that
commercial sites
like Amazon are developing various participative services,
like the
ability to add annotations and to create these booklists,
that are much
friendlier and more community-oriented than anything I\’ve
seen from any
of the library vendors.
—
v
Elizabeth Thomsen, Member Services Manager
NOBLE: North of Boston Library Exchange
[email protected]
.
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