wk7 LibraryThing

It's like a giant book club that is able to involve authors, publishers, bibliographic records from Libraries and Readers around the world. If used for State Library's website, it allows extensive sharing: authors' promotions of their work (eg. talks they give at State Library's Events can be YouTubed), reviews can be posted, readers can share their views and provide recommendations of other publications of similar field; links to the catalogue records allows physical access to the books, or, referrals to other libraries. This set up can also incorporate special events organised by the Library, such as the Miles Franklin award. How about a section on what staff members of the Library are reading at the moment... Oh, and not forgetting the 'legal deposit' publications. We should have a space for them too.

This site reminds me the pleasure of reading fiction... I think it is in Publishers' interest to promote this tool.

wk7 Del.icio.us tag cloud and Sutherland Shire Libraries

It's a bookmarking system that sets up see references which take the users to the information they want to access. I was impressed with the tag cloud of Sutherland Shire Libraries in that the users are able to access Libraries' holdings while browsing the tag cloud. The collections are also listed on the same listing as other urls the Library has bookmarked as reference tools (eg. institutions' urls such as Art Gallery of NSW, etc.). This means the users don't have to leave delicious and go to the Library's database to access the information. The tags are grouped by subject categories: any urls and Library's holdings of similar subject category are grouped under the one tag.