By Lars Iselid, InternetBrus

LibraryThing, which was launched in Beta in August, is a service similar to the bookmark service Del.icio.us and the photo sharing service Flickr. As you have probably guessed, LibraryThing organizes books.

With LibraryThing you can search for books from Library of Congress or Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.fr, and Amazon.de. You can then add tags – topics or categories of your choice.

You can also add your own notes to every book and even enter books manually in case the book you want to add to your library can’t be found in Amazon or the Library of Congress.

Like in other similar services, you can see the libraries of other LibraryThing users, add their books to your own library and much more.

Similar, competing services include Reader2 and Bibliophil. Reader2 offers RSS, but not search of any library catalogue like Library of Congress.

A lot could happen with LibraryThing in the future and developer Tim Spalding is open for suggestions and improvements. If your LibraryThing library exceeds 200 books, he asks 10 US dollars for his trouble.

This article was originally published in Internetbrus, a Swedish blog on search engines and Internet searching that has been online since early 2001. It is written for both searchers and educators.

Internetbrus is owned and edited by Lars Våge and Lars Iselid. Lars Våge works as a librarian at Mitthögskolan and a programmer for JL Informationsteknik. Lars Iselid is a librarian at the Umeå University Library, freelance journalist for the computer magazine
Datormagazin. He can be found blogging under the pseudonym Cyrille at Iaslash.org.

Lars and Lars are co-authors of a book on Internet research: Informationssökning på Internet.