A Matter of Taste

After some review, I've decided that choosing between Shelfari and LibraryThing is a personal choice that depends on what the user wants to do with the site. Both will record the books you read, books you own, and or books you intend to read. Both allow for joining or forming social groups around your reading tastes, and allow easy communication among friends or groups.

If you are a librarian, and want to catalog your personal collection like you do at work, Librarything seems more equipped to carefully catalog books using Library of Congress classifications. Your collection records can resemble like real library records. I would even think that it could work for small business or organization libraries, and Shelfari does not seem equipped to handle those tasks.

On the other hand, for the casual user, Shelfari feels easier to use and the display is less cluttered. I like the way the books look on the shelf, like real books rather than cover pictures. Yes, its a cheap trick of taking the cover shot and adding a set image to make it look like a book, but I like it. The discussion also doesn't take the standard discussion list display format.
I did find it difficult to search for a group that showed up once when I clicked groups. It was there as recently updated, and then when I tried to search for it, the search wouldn't search for anything but the entire group name-School library media specialists had to be the entire name. That was a pain. I found it and joined by browsing the list alphabetically, but bad search Shelfari. They could probably do better with a Google search this site feature.

I'm going to continue to play with both sites, I joined Shelfari last night as Bamboo- with the thought of using it for discussing books popular in my school library.