As a little follow-up to the book organizer thing: I was eavesdropping on a conversation between some Library Science students at school and they were talking about Seattle Public Library's new "tag cloud" and "read-alikes." Further discussion proved that these were in fact drawn from LibraryThing's "For Libraries" service. This service sells recommendation services, reviews, and user-defined tags to libraries, to help them improve on-site search.
Take a look at this example of Crime and Punishment, down on the bottom of the page you can see what they were talking about.
Anyway, the issue arose that LibraryThing doesn't make it super clear to its users that they are farming out this info they've just uploaded. In fact, the user is paying a fee to be a part of the site, so they wondered if there should be a kick back involved? As someone who just cataloged their collection, I don't really object to it, since you're making the information public and hoping it will be used by putting it on the site.
What do you think?
Thursday, March 27, 2008
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2 comments:
Hey, the LibraryThing guy here. I wish I had been eavesdropping too. So I'll eavesdrop here, if you don't mind.
I understand the concern, but I do want to point out the first paragraph of first question on the "Privacy/Terms of Use" page, available from all pages:
"LibraryThing will not sell any personally-identifiable information to any third party. This would be evil, and we are not evil. We reserve the right to sell or give away anonymous or aggregate information."
And not all users are paying to use the site. And we have no advertising for members, free or paid.
As far as a kick-back, it would be one thing if libraries were floating the site, but alas they're not, at least yet. If we do better, maybe we can get rid of the charge. (It's good in some ways—eg., it increases loyalty. But it also loses us people, I know.) A case could be made that we should charge people more, however, and libraries less :)
Hey Tim, thanks for the quick response to that one. I posted your comment to the discussion list in question to see what they will say.
It seems to me that any use of the info is good, and libraries are generally considered for the "public good."
Being library students, some of them were equally concerned with SPL's non-disclosure of where it was getting the info. The full transparency is getting more important. Either way, SPL is a pretty nice partner for LibraryThing, so congratulations for your site's success. Too bad LibraryThing isn't based in Seattle or I would put in a resume for an internship.
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