LibraryThing

I'm not so sure that I'll continue to use LibraryThing very much in the future, but as a cataloger I did notice one really interesting thing about it. When you're in the "List view" and the "E" style of your library, you can see the Library of Congress Subject Headings (aka LCSH) for the book. Then, you can compare those headings to the tags that people have given them.

This is the view that you want to choose:





What you may notice, depending on the subject matter of your book, is that the LC subject heading language is quite different from the folksonomy.

For example, one of the books in my LibraryThing library is How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. This has, of course, the somewhat notorious subject heading of "Cookery." Here's the tag cloud for this book:

Cookery is certainly there (tagged by librarians, no doubt!), but cooking, cookbook, food, and recipes, are more common tags for this. Of course they are. Who knows to look for "cookery" besides librarians?!

One more example is The Baby Book, by William Sears. The LC subject headings for this title include

~Infants > Care
~Infants > Development
~Infants (Newborn) > Care
~Newborn infants > Care

Here's the tag cloud:

Infants is so small you can't even see it.