About a year ago I blogged about LibraryThing and what a great online tool it was for organizing your personal library. And also how it functions as a social network. But why would an actual library want to use it? Here are some thoughts.

One of the best ways for a library to use LibraryThing requires the least amount of work. You don’t have to create an account or add your collection or pay or anything. Instead, you can use it as a collection development tool. Just do a search for any title and you’ll get a list of books that “People who own this book also own….” The only catch is that there must be at least 10 owners of a book for this recommendation list to be available. There is a surprising number of rather esoteric works already in LibraryThing, and a whopping 6.9 million books are already listed.

Want to search a different way? You can get the same kind of recommendation list by search their list of tags. So, when subject headings aren’t getting you the results you need, there’s a natural-language alternative.

Another way for libraries to use LibraryThing is for reading book reviews. There are already over 83,000 book reviews in their system. Granted, these don’t quite match Library Journal or CHOICE in their quality all the time, but they can be helpful.

Do you just want to see what’s popular? Visit their Zeitgeist page. Not only will you find out how many members are on LibraryThing or how many works have been cataloged or reviewed, but you can also see a list of the top 25 most-reviewed books, books added in the last 24 hours, top authors, top tags, top books, and much more.

Foreign language works are also available, which makes LibraryThing a better choice for those kinds of books than Books In Print, which is pretty sparse in the non-English category. Not only are foreign languages included, but they even have foreign language versions of Library Thing. Check out LibraryThing.de, LibraryThing.fr, LibraryThing.nl, LibraryThing.it, and LibraryThing.es. And there’s even a Welsh version up and coming!

Of course, you can always enter your library collection (or maybe a specific sub-collection) and use that for finding other books that similarly interested people already own. That would even allow your library to be searched by tags, in case your catalog doesn’t already have that option.

LibraryThing is even “exploring relationships with libraries, to offer non-commercially motivated recommendations and other social data.” With over 100,000 members already, and with the directions that the company has already taken, LibraryThing is going to be a library-friendly tool that we’ll all have to keep an eye on.

And in case you want to read more or keep up on LibraryThing developments, they have their own blog with its own RSS feed.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, if you’re a compulsive librarian and want to catalog your personal library at home, you can get LC and Dewey call numbers (variations included) to apply to your books.