Monday, 10 September 2012
Exercise 6
Write a post on your
blog commenting on the usefulness of these reviews. Do you think libraries
should be providing this service? Does the library you use have this option
available on their catalogue? Make certain you label your post.
I believe it is very useful and
informative for patrons to have access to reviews of books before purchasing or
borrowing these. While my local library, City of Canada Bay Library, does not
offer this service, I personally always look up and read reviews for books I
intend to borrow and having such a review system integrated into the library
catalogue would be very convenient and appealing to me. Furthermore, people may
feel encouraged to sample new authors or genres by reading reviews, expanding
their literary horizon. However, on the other hand, these reviews may be rather
subjective, and a negative review, especially when highlighted through an
integration in the library catalogue, may discourage patrons from reading a
certain book. One possible option would be to present a myriad of reviews and
aggregate ‘score’ for each book, similar to Amazon’s review system, where each
item receives a mean score out of five stars sourced from user submitted
reviews. This would be more representative of popular opinion of the book as opposed
to the view of a single, possibly biased individual.
I believe it is very useful and
informative for patrons to have access to reviews of books before purchasing or
borrowing these. While my local library, City of Canada Bay Library, does not
offer this service, I personally always look up and read reviews for books I
intend to borrow and having such a review system integrated into the library
catalogue would be very convenient and appealing to me. Furthermore, people may
feel encouraged to sample new authors or genres by reading reviews, expanding
their literary horizon. However, on the other hand, these reviews may be rather
subjective, and a negative review, especially when highlighted through an
integration in the library catalogue, may discourage patrons from reading a
certain book. One possible option would be to present a myriad of reviews and
aggregate ‘score’ for each book, similar to Amazon’s review system, where each
item receives a mean score out of five stars sourced from user submitted
reviews. This would be more representative of popular opinion of the book as opposed
to the view of a single, possibly biased individual.
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I agree, it's always helpful to be able to read reviews of books you're interested in by regular people as opposed to professional endorsements on the book jacket. I suppose libraries would be taking a leap of faith that customers would leave fair and balanced reviews. I'm not sure if you were viewing reviews from the LibraryThing service, but I was looking into it recently for the class and found that they do also offer a star rating feature in addition to reviews, much like Amazon.
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