March 9th, 2010 Brian Herzog
CoverGuess was released last week, and the LibraryThing blog post explains the what and why better than I can:
What is CoverGuess?
CoverGuess is a sort of game. We give you covers, and you describe them in words. If you guess the same things as other players, you get points.
Why are you doing this?
The goal is to have fun, but also to build up a database of cover descriptions, to answer questions like “Do you have that book with bride on the bicycle?”
You have to have a LibraryThing account to play, but it’s worth a free account to get in on the action.
CoverGuess was inspired by one of my favorite internet timesinks, Google’s Image Labeler. Both of these make the internet a better place, but CoverGuess could actually help in answering reference questions. I’ll be keeping watch for when the search component is released, but for now, racking up tagging points is fun.
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January 28th, 2010 Brian Herzog
Speaking of creative bookmarks, I love these combination custom book covers/bookmarks:
Similarly, last year our Children’s Librarian started pulling books that she felt were good, but had misleading or unexciting covers, and had kids design their own covers. That’s a great idea, and it’s fun to take great ideas just a little bit further.
Yay for activities that involves patrons and lets them take more ownership of their library use.
via LISNews
Tags: book, book covers, bookmark, bookmarks, Books, covers, custom, homemade, libraries, Library, public See Also
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January 16th, 2010 Brian Herzog
A patron walked up to the desk one morning and said:
My book group met last night to talk about Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian. A question came up that we couldn’t agree on, so I hope you can answer it for us. On the cover of the book there is a woman in an orange dress - who is she?
The patron went off to look for her book group’s new selection, and I started searching. I haven’t read this book and didn’t know what the cover looked like, but I was hoping she was asking which character the cover represented, and not who the actual model was.
After a searching for various combinations of the title, author, “cover,” “woman,” and “orange dress,” I found something rather surprising on the She Reads and Reads blog:
Have you seen these women?
The first lot of similar covers I’m featuring this week are Lives of the Saints by Nino Ricci, Blaming by Elizabeth Taylor and Verbena by Nanci Kincaid:
Working in a library, I’ve seen a lot of similar book covers, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the exact same stock photo reused before. This makes me sad, because it reinforces that it’s probably the publisher making decisions like this, rather than the author.
With that in mind, I next looked for Chris Bohjalian’s website to ask him who he felt the woman in the orange dress represented. Delightfully, he provided an answer a few days later.
I let the patron know the next time I saw her, and she was very happy - thrilled, actually, to have an answer right from the author. So yay for Web 2.0 and direct dialog.
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Posted under Books, Library, Reference Question | 6 Comments »
