PIM for Gecks

I’m trying to define the content that I will put in my Moodle courses and I’m trying to understand where information behaviors around social software come in. Take LibraryThing for example. Users of this tool organize their personal collections of books using metadata from Amazon.com, Library of Congress, 45 other libraries, or from the users themselves. The functions of finding and collocating information resources are accomplished not only through the use of these different sources of metadata but also through the creation of a social layer of metadata by which users’ preferences and profiles are related to one another. How do we account for these processes in our standards of information organization and in our understanding of information behaviors?

I’m thinking while I’m exploring. I have created an account. Searched for titles or authors that I have in my possession or that I have read in the past ten years. Clicked the item that best matches what I have (or read) in the results set and it is added to my library. Most of the records come with cover images and the usual metadata elements of author, title, year of pub, ISBN, and fields where I can enter reviews or other URLs related to the resource. I am shown links to users who also have the same items in their collection. I joined a group called Librarians who LibraryThing. And so many other features.

Now, if you look at My LibraryThing Catalog, I must say I really don’t have all these books in my possession. I was working from memory. Perhaps this is not a legitimate use of the tool. But I was using the tool to recollect the books that I have really dug into in the past ten years and this process has helped me reconstruct the contexts in which I have read these books. Like, I read Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the family because my tennis instructor in Sri Lanka was the husband of the sister of the author. Or my interest in Virginia Woolf peaked from reading a novel written by her husband Leonard who briefly served as a British civil servant in Sri Lanka. Or I’ve read C.S. Lewis at a time when I needed to get in touch with why I consider myself a Christian.

I really do not collect books. We’ve moved a lot. Books quickly take up a lot of alloted shipping weight so we gave them away each time we moved. I keep only a few on our shelves. My personal collection of books is more of a jangle of connections in my memory than they are an orderly line-up of physical books on my shelves. Tools like LibraryThing help me recreate and rearrange my collections by providing new ways of viewing and connecting to books.

P.S. - here’s a blog post on the ethics of what’s being cataloged on LT: what you really own, what your spouse/significant other owns, what you have read but don’t really own, what you have on your shelves but actually haven’t read, etc. What do you think?