Thursday, August 09, 2007

Librarything and MediaLabs

Librarything (which I have mentioned a few times) has teamed up with MediaLab the developers of the AquaBrowser faceted search tool. Via EoinPurcell.

Tim Spalding over at LibraryThing speaks highly of the Aquabrowser people and the new product:
AquaBrowser which makes one of the few really interesting online library catalogs, has teamed up with us to offer LibraryThing tags and recommendations within AquaBrowser. The product is called My Discoveries. Basically, it gives AquaBrowser a series of desirable social features, like tagging, list-making, ratings and reviews—and not in some half-assed way either. LibraryThing comes in as a way to kick off the tag data (a 21-million-tags kick) and to add recommendations to it. My Discovery customers who choose to go with LibraryThing data will be able to see both LibraryThing's as well as their own patron's efforts.
This is an interesting application using data gathered in a social network (that is for free) to create additional value in an application that is fee based. Nothing wrong with that. Since MediaLabs is owned by Bowker (and AquaBrowser was implemented in BooksinPrint under my watch) when will Librarything data be incorporated into BIP?

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