Adventure into Gurulib

I can't resist not to explore this site because the LibraryThing is quite difficult to use. I want to see how easy this site is for building online personal library.

According to Gurulib, it claims to provide home library cataloguing and organising application. Users can catalogue books, music, movies, software and games. I haven't tried to use LibraryThing to catalogue music yet, and I doubt it can. I was pretty happy with Gurulib's music and movie cataloguing ability because I need that to catalogue my personal collection of music scores, classical music DVD and CD.

Signing up was very easy and free. Adding book is simple and straight too. I can choose to use ISBN or manual cataloguing. I have tried to add one book that I just finished reading recently, "Google Blogger For Dummies". This is what it looks if I choose to do manual cataloguing. Please see the diagram below.

I found that it has simpler setup compare to LibraryThing. I think this is better for general public without cataloguing training to use the tool to record their home based personal libraries.

Here is the manual cataloging page in LibraryThing. It offers more links to other sources which users can import the copy cataloguing from. The setup looks more like cataloguing tool used in professional library cataloguing system.



Do you think home library need such a detailed level of cataloguing? Plus, do you think general public has more time to search other libraries for detailed bibliography records?? I don't think so. Therefore, I will recommend Gurulib for setting up home library.

Back to Gurulib, here is another diagram which shows how bibliographic record is arranged in the book details section. The layout is simple with the most important details located at the centre of the page. While further information such as DDC, ISBN is gathered at the right column. There is ad at the left column which I found that is annoying. But those are what you will get for free online service.

Now, going back to my gurulib homepage, here is my virtual bookshelf with only 1 book at the moment. When I put cursor over the bookcover, it will open a box with brief description of that book. Cool tool.


There are a lot of other functions embedded in Gurulib, such as barcode reading ability through web cam (I haven't tried this out yet!!), note taking ability, cataloguing research papers online, facebook application, iGoogle Module, blog widget, graphical RSS (Wow, I don't even know what this is) and etc. So, yeah!! It is a cool tool. I will continue to use it.

My delicious and My LibraryThing

OO.. Talking about my delicious, I have used it since last year. What I did last week was I learned how to embed Delicious widget into this blog, please visit my previous post if you are interested to know how to do it.

I just checked my delicious site. I have 116 bookmarks and 110 tags. I put tags to help me to search them easily.


Here are my tags. The most popular tags that I use are:

• 1. libraries-reference-resources (61)
• 2. Facts-n-Figues (31)
• 3. Authoritative Resources (30)
• 4. Government Resources (28)
• 5. Search Tools (28)
• 6. Statistic (28)
• 7. Australian Government sites (27)
• 8. Virtual Reference (27)

The reason I used Delicious is preparing myself to be a reference librarian in the future. So, I started to set up this online web-based bookmarks to collect all the bookmarks (it is actually the URL of each related site) to help me to search and provide useful links easily for patrons in need. The benefit of using web-site social bookmark is, it allows me to access to these bookmarks wherever and whenever I have internet access. I don't have to store these bookmarks on my USB to carry them around. I think the bad site for this is, if Delicious's site went down or in maintenance or in repair one day, I won't be able to access this information.

As it claims in its about page, it is a free social bookmarking service. Users can discover, tag/categorise, save/store, manage and share web pages (URL). It is designed for dealing with web pages. It can be used on most of the browsers including: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, and bookmaklet button on any browser. It also provides tools (linkrolls, tagrolls, network badges, blog posting) to enable users to link and display widget to individual blog.

I haven't used EndNote before. I wonder how similar and different in function from Delicious.

Now, here comes my LibraryThing, I didn't use it very much. This is my first impression of it: Wow!! too much information squeezed into one page, too complicated to use. I prefer to use Delicious than using LibraryThing. But they each serves different purposes. For Delicious, it allows me to save and manage bookmarks. For LibraryThing, it allows me to build my personal online library with my own collection. It took me longer time to learn how to use LiraryThing. Honestly, a lot of functions I still don't know how to use and no time to explore them.

On its homepage, it claims that it allows users to catalog books from Amazon, the Library of Congress and other world libraries. This means I can import (copy cataloguing) the related bibliographic record from the linked resources. I can share my own book review or view other people's comment on the same book that I intended to put on my personal library. It acts like a booklover community that I can find people with same interest and explore new books. It is available in many languages. Ha ha.... Yeah! I have to switch to chinese language to catalogue my chinese book.

Well, I am a bit ashamed to tell you all that, there are only 5 books on my LibraryThing. As a 'perfectionist', it normally took me ages to cataloge a book, find its book cover and fill in some information about it.


Here are some information about LibraryThing. It is an online personal library service that allows users to build own library, search for new books and publishers' first comment, a community of book reviews, and access books catalogue anywhere and anytime with internet. It doesn't need software to setup, but it only allows users to catalogue first 200 books for free. It charges really small amout of money $25 USD for cataloguing as many books as users want for a lifetime.

I reckon it is useful for librarians, especially small community libraries. It has a full powered cataloging application, and it allows editing, sorting, storing, managing of books in a collections. Small libraries can use it as a catalogue for their collection, according to LibraryThing. Its LibraryThing for Libraries application allows: tag-based browsing, book recommendations, ratings and reviews. It has widget to be used in personal blog too. (Great discovery today, I need to dig this out).

On its tools page, it has information about how to add Librarything widget to individual blog and mobile phone; adding chiclet; adding bookmaklet on Amazon; iPhone application; adding book-extension to Google Chrome; following LibraryThing on Twitter, Flickr, YouTube Channel, LiveJournal; import and export data to LibraryThing.

I was and still am overwhelmed by its extensive applications included. Too many information and too difficult to manage or explore it. That's why I never have time to add more books into my collection in LibraryThing. Shame! Shame!!