Yow! The response to LibraryThing for Libraries at my library has been amazing. I can’t wait to see our catalog stats for this month. Of course, the first thing everyone wants to be able to do is add tags themselves. After listening to Tim and the PennTags folks at CiL, I questioned the wisdom of individual libraries using tagging, but was really into the idea of a statewide tagging database. Something that would aggregate the efforts of every library and share tags between everyone’s catalogs.

Then I saw the LTFL post over at Pattern Recognition. Tag Limewire (I was saying Tag Napster, but that’s not terribly up-to-date is it?) what a good idea! Rather then a centrally housed tag repository, libraries would share tags. Here’s the hard part- LTFL uses javascript to grab the tags from LT. If we were sharing tags, would we have scripts for each library we were sharing them with? Or would we share data in another way? I’m not code-savvy enough to get it, but it seems like there should be a way to grab tags from multiple places without having a distinct script for each place. Especially if those multiple places were all similarly configured places on each library’s server. Ultimately, I’m still not convinced that we could generate the tagging power on our that LibraryThing is able to harness. Especially after re-reading the Amazon and LibraryThing comparison. The hinted-at LTFL widget that would allow tagging would be a different story, though.

Also, one of my favorite things about LTFL is that it carries the tags across editions and formats- FRBRization of tags. How would that work? So far, this little mental exercise has just made me even more impressed with the LibraryThing team. They have some serious magical powers.