Monday, January 26, 2009

WorldCat New Books List?

I have a couple of questions:
1. Have you created a WorldCat account in order to make and/or watch lists?
2. Do you think anyone else has?
The reason I ask is I just logged into my WorldCat account (which I don't do very often) to look for interesting lists to follow. I searched for "engineering" and found that the Kresge Engineering Library at UC Berkeley makes lists of all its new books. You can see their profile and lists here.
So I was wondering if it would be worthwhile to copycat UCB. The idea would be that our patrons could follow the list so they would be able to easily see what our new books are. (Of course, they can already see our new books pretty easily by looking at our new books page, but this would make it even easier.)
Alternatively, I've noticed that some units have RSS feeds of their new books available. I don't think we have that going on, but that would achieve the same effect.
I guess the point is whether students/faculty might find such a thing useful. Part of me thinks yes, because I personally like to keep an eye out for cool new books. But part of me also thinks no, because students/faculty are primarily concerned with their own work/research and will search (or have search updates) for those subjects on their own.
Any thoughts?

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