Thing #19

The Web 2.0 Awards are awarded to the best sites that use this new technology in some way. For this Thing, I looked at the three top sites for the category "Books."
Lulu took first place. Lulu is a global marketplace where anyone can publish their own material (with cover art and binding) and purchase other material. This is something that I think librarians should be aware of. It seems often that would-be authors come to the library looking for information on publishing and this might be an option for some of them.
Second place went to Biblio where one can search for used and rare books. Also another good site for librarians to be aware of, with some of our well-loved books falling apart from use!
And third place was VuFind. One their website it states:

VuFind is a library resource portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries. The goal of VuFind is to enable your users to search and browse through all of your library's resources by replacing the traditional OPAC to include:

• Catalog Records
• Locally Cached Journals
• Digital Library Items
• Institutional Repository
• Institutional Bibliography
• Other Library Collections and Resources

Wow! How did I not know about this? The live demo didn't work for me but it looks really interesting and seems to have a lot of potential. Imagine how handy this would be! I think I'll look into this a little more.
So I guess I decided that the Web 2.0 Awards are useful for librarians to be aware of, they provide noteworthy things going on in the technology world!