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June 18, 2019 7:27 PM   Subscribe

As part of an exhibition in a library, we would like to provide a way for visitors to quickly and easily access a manually curated list of the books the library holds on a particular topic. Ideally we would save the permalinks to each of about 10 holdings to a list in an online service and then provide a QR code going to that list. What service or app should I be looking at for this?

Pinterest is almost perfect. I can create a board for each topic, populate it with items from the library (their catalogue even has a "share to Pinterest" link) and link to the board with a QR code. But the user gets prompted to sign in or sign up, which I don't want them to have to do.

I can manually create a webpage with these items, but I would rather not if there's an existing service that would work.

I am happy to pay for this, but the end users of my list shouldn't have to pay or even register
posted by lollusc to Technology (9 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: Do you want people to be able to look at book covers and etc. in the list, or is the list literally just a list of URLs from your catalog? I know it's a little lateral but you could use some simple (free) mailing list software like TinyLetter for this. Make a booklist as an email to send out. Send that email (just to yourself or who knows) and then it would wind up in the "letter archive" which is just a linked web page. Bonus, no tracking. I'm aware this may just be like "To someone with a hammer everything looks like a nail" but each email would be archived online with a unique URL (to link the QR code to) and you could include some library branding with it if you wanted to.
posted by jessamyn at 7:54 PM on June 18, 2019


Tumblr?
posted by soelo at 7:58 PM on June 18, 2019


it's not free but this is one of the things that libguides is built for.
posted by noloveforned at 9:04 PM on June 18, 2019


Response by poster: Jessamyn, that is genius. People don't need to be able to look at the book covers, so that would definitely fulfill our requirements!
posted by lollusc at 9:35 PM on June 18, 2019


Jessamyn's way is simple, but it is not dynamic. i.e. once each list is created, it can't be updated on the fly. I would use a site like pinboard.in (a clone of the good old del.icio.us before it was destroyed by yahoo). Pinboard costs $11 for life and it is totally worth it.

Here's the way you'd do it:

- Setup an account
- Pre-decide on a selection of tags for each of the topics you want to link people to. You could have 'romance', 'thriller', etc. or by author, year. Whatever you like. Multiple tags mean more ways to organise the information.
- Add a link to each book, and tag it with the relevant tag. You can add a title and also add a short summary for each book. Because you can use multiple tags, one book can be on several lists. So, 'Who Goes There?' by Joseph Campbell would be tagged both 'horror' and 'scifi' but it might also be tagged '1938', the year it was published.
- Once all your books are added and tagged, you can link to each individual tag page. These are the pages you share with users. All the horror books will have a page, as will all the books published in 1938. The possibilities are endless.

Benefit of this setup is, as above, books can be on multiple lists, and the lists can be updated (additions or deletions) as and when you wish. The other benefit is that you can link to the entire account you setup, and this comes with a tag cloud on the right hand side so users can browse all the books at their own leisure.
posted by 0bvious at 2:51 AM on June 19, 2019 [2 favorites]


Does the library catalogue not have the facility to make a public list? It's a fairly standard feature - it may well require someone at the library to create, publish and populate it first but if you are working with the library for this exhibition, I assume you have some sort of contact there. plus, if the visitors are already members of the library, it makes reserving etc. a lot easier.

We do similar to highlight books for Student Mental Health Week or other similar informational things in my library (these are separate to academic reading lists or new book lists as those are either held in another system or are automatically generated.).
posted by halcyonday at 3:10 AM on June 19, 2019 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: it may well require someone at the library to create, publish and populate it first

Yeah that's the problem with the libguide or similar solution. The library staff are super busy and the exhibition is soon and if I can take this off their hands it's easier for everyone.

I don't anticipate needing to update the lists. It's a one-off thing. There's no need for users to browse by tag or anything either.

And actually, I may have found another solution too: our national library has a public lists feature where anyone can create a list from items in its catalogue, and share it. It links to holdings in this specific library, among others, so if the other people involved are happy with this, it might be the best option.
posted by lollusc at 6:24 AM on June 19, 2019 [1 favorite]


For me, Goodreads would be the best way for me to access this because it would let me click on each book, read its reviews, etc.
posted by metasarah at 7:02 AM on June 19, 2019


They may just have to create you (or the exhibition) as a borrower so you can log in and populate/publish but the national library option sounds good.
posted by halcyonday at 8:13 AM on June 19, 2019


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