First Group Meeting

This is the blog for the Library 200 section 20 group…The Darling Buds of Pasadena. This blog will serve to document the group effort involved in investigating and dissecting different social networking sites that revolve around books, and readers who connect through books.

On January 31 the Darling Buds of Pasadena met at Kaldi coffee to get started on the social networking sites project for Library 200-20. With introductions out of the way we moved on to discuss what library social networking sites we would like to compare and contrast. These are the sites we looked at:

http://www.librarything.com
http://www.goodreads.com
http://www.shelfari.com
http://www.bookrabbit.com
http://www.facebook.com
http://www.paperbackswap.com

At the end of a lengthy discussion we chose three sites that approach social networking through books from a different angle. The links are listed at the side of this blog.

• We ruled out shelfari and goodreads since they are so similar to librarything.

• We chose librarything since it is considered the first such website and is also the most populated site.

• We also ruled out bookrabbit since it seemed to be more UK centric.

• We chose paperback swap since it has a different angle-it has more of “lending library” concept that was unique to all the different sites.

• We also chose Facebook since it seems to be the dominant social networking tool.

With our topics in hand we divided up the work and how we were going to approach the division of labor…We opted for three sites to be explored and discussed by three different members. The fourth person, me, would create a blog to highlight and document our labors. So without further adieu…Here is our blog, we will be posting our findings very soon!