Putting our Catalog on Church Website

Our church is using Media Library Manager to catalog books and for circulation. We have also imported most of our books into a private Library Thing catalog. We want to make our LT catalog available to members through our church website. I'd like to hear how other churches have done this. Also some examples on the internet that I can view would help a lot. Thanks!

I have about 1200 of our 3000 materials on LT. Our church is in the middle of switching webhosts, so we haven't put the link on the page yet. We'll add the link when the new site is up and running. But a friend of mine googled our LT name and got into it that way. I haven't been able to replicate that...I'll let you know how it turns out. The goal is mid-October.

There's no way to "embed" the catalog in your church website. Rather, you can link to it. That's how members do it.

In order for this to work, however, you must have a public library. The only other option is to have a private one and give out your password to everyone. This is annoying and a security problem. Make it public.

To BeulahChurchLibrary: I tried googling our LT name and it came up! First hit was our church library blog on our church website. Next hit was our LT.

To timspalding: Yes, I figured we'd have to make our LT public. When you say link to our LT on our church website, I guess you mean our LT homepage url? What about a widget? Would that work?

Widgets work. But there's no way to embed the whole library and all its functionality elsewhere.

Thanks, Tim. I visited your LT and also other church LTs and I see how easily a link works. I like the way BeulahChurchLibrary linked to their catalog on their church website, so I don't think I'll bother with a widget.

I appreciate the input from you and from BeulahChurchLibrary very much!

littlelibrary,

I see that you are using MLM for your church library. I just found that on the web recently. The price is very reasonable. How about the software....does it do the job?

We've used it since spring, and it has all the functions we need and our workers like it. We are using it without a scanner right now, and that works fine for us. I'd suggest you download the trial and play around with it to see if it meets your particular needs. Out of all the trials I downloaded I liked MLM the best.

Bob Langer, who wrote the software, gives personal and prompt customer service. If you have questions before ordering you can call him and he will be the one who answers the phone! I've also emailed him several times and he answers right away.

Thanks for the info. I called Mr. Langer and talked to him about MLM. I have downloaded the trial and hope to try it out over the next few days. It sounds like just what we need. I wouldn't be using the scanner at this time either.

I really appreciate your help on this.

This is good information--I'm starting to catalog our older collection of my church library, and I don't want to spend $500 on a system with ongoing maintenance when I'm not even sure it will work for our purposes or get used! So the cheaper the better, at least initially. Then if it gets usage (fingers crossed) I might upgrade.

I'd love to hear other people's input on MLM or other cheaper options to see what's worth purchasing for a newbie collection!

As a new LibraryThing user for my own books, I have an account for the church library and am exploring using it for the church's catalog. We now have a computer but I was not planning to purchase (nor can the church affiord) any software. I was not planning on maintaining the card catalog. Why would my library need MLM or Librarian's Helper or any other system out there?

(And I will link on the church website when I can get enough items.)

I have started a blog for our church library. On the side bar I have an LT widget. I love the catalog listed this way -- easy to do a search of not only title and author, but topics (through the tags). All of our new acquisitions since 11/09 are on there. Can't wait to get the computer hooked up in the library to add the rest of the catalog. It will be easy to delete books that are old or lost too.