Psychology New Books on LibraryThing

I’ve recently been working with the psychology librarian, Karine Barker, to develop a LibraryThing account for psychology books at the Radcliffe Science Library.   LibraryThing is a social media site where users create and share a catalogue of their books.  Anyone can view it without the need to create an account.  We’re using this to promote new books and also as a place to bring the psychology books together.  Psychology students and staff are told about it at training sessions,  it is advertised on the Psychology LibGuide and they are sent an email reminder each month.

Screenshot of Developmental psychology collection in covers view
Developmental psychology collection in covers view

The Radcliffe Science Library got a LibraryThing account back in February 2o11 and we had been putting all the new psychology books into a ‘psychology’ collection – collections are what the folders you can create to organise books in LibraryThing are called – but this was getting rather full and we decided at the beginning of this term some more collections would be helpful.  Now each new book is put into a collection for the term it arrived, so far we’ve just got Trinity Term 2012, and also a relevant subject collection such as clinical psychology or history of psychology.  We’re hoping that this will make it easier for readers to find books relevant to what they are interested in.  One of the really useful things about LibraryThing is that that books can be in more than one collection.

Most of the data needed for each record can be easily imported and I just add the shelfmark and tags for each book, and select which subject collections to put it in.  I’m also gradually working my way through all the books that had already been put on LibraryThing and putting them into appropriate subject collections.  We did look for a way to link straight from LibraryThing to the relevant record on SOLO, but we couldn’t find a satisfactory way.  So Karine has added instructions to the New Books page on the Psychology LibGuide suggesting to copy and paste the ISBN of the book from LibraryThing into a SOLO search.

I really like the visual way LibraryThing displays the catalogue, particularly as a way of presenting new books.  There’s a choice of a list view, with various details visible, and a covers view, with just images of the book covers – a virtual new books display.

Screenshot of the health psychology collection in list view
The health psychology collection in list view

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