Seattle Public Library Reading Room discussion

How should we use them? At the very least I think we should put all the books in our book lists for adults and Shelf Talk posts here. It may be easier to find titles mentioned on Shelf Talk here than trying to search the blog. What do others think?

Hmmmm.... I've joined a couple of different groups on goodreads, and haven't seen (or thought of) a useful way to use the bookshelves that doesn't repeat effort. Let's keep mulling

I find Goodreads most useful for booklist construction. It seems to me that our own bookshelves are good enough, since we can all search each other's shelves.
So what would we want to put on the group shelves? I kinda like Abby's idea, but I don't want anyone to work twice.

I see your point about replicating work, Linda, but I also see the value of having all of those titles in one place. Right now, we have to go to the booklists page, which is buried in our website, or search the blog, which can be clumsy and time-consuming. If we want to use this group as an RA tool for SPL staff, then I think having one central place where all the books we recommend live could be very useful. Why not our bookshelf? Also, Wally, I think it is great to be able to search each other's shelves, but again, it takes time and we all use different tags to describe our books.

Another thing I would like to see us use our bookshelf for is read-alike construction, especially for currently popular adult fiction & nonfiction titles. For instance, yesterday, I had a patron who was looking for something like "Eat Pray Love." Novelist wasn't much help, and the patron actually gave me a REALLY good description of why that book appealed to her, but I still felt like I didn't come up with the most stellar suggestions (she'd already looked at the LibraryThing suggestions in our catalog before I spoke with her). I'd love to see us use these shelves as a place for quick & dirty read-alike lists that aren't already covered elsewhere.

OK, I might be sold on the idea of having one bookshelf (meta-bookshelf?) here for all of us to use, but the first thing that comes to my mind is that we will need to tag books in a uniform, standard manner. You're right, Abby, about how all our tags reflect our own idiosyncracies; so to make this thing work, we'll need to agree to some tagging standards. It's practically cataloging, but I don't want to go there :)

I agree with you Wally, we definitely need some standards. I wasn't in the TSL group when you started the goodreads account so I don't know how you figured out the shelves, but I think there might have been a few people who worked on creating tagging standards for that account. I am more than happy to work on/spearhead this effort, because I love me some taxonomies!

I think Lesley James and maybe Hayden were our main tagalogers (apologies to all Filipinos).

How would you tag for a read-alike? This one puzzles me, but it is late in the year and my brain is tired.

"Another thing I would like to see us use our bookshelf for is read-alike construction, especially for currently popular adult fiction & nonfiction titles."

I would love this, as someone who doesn't get enough time to read adult fiction/non-fiction that people are asking for. We do need a uniform tagging system--is there a way to steal keywords from the SPL catalog?