Today's New York Times article about software and services for inventorying wine collections reminded me of a project that I did last quarter in a class on Information Architecture. Students identified and analyzed new website genres, and one of the genres I chose to discuss was what I called inventory sites. These sites allow users to create useful electronic representations of their belongings in the physical world--and in this way, they have a lot in common with library catalogs.
I focused on four examples: LibraryThing (for books), Squirl (for collectibles), Zestr (for home media), and CraftMemo (for crafting supplies). In addition to differences in their subject matter, these sites also have different features that belie the creators' intentions. Some have a strong social-networking component. Others are entirely self-contained for the use of individual members. Small differences in the database set-up can have a large impact on what the user can do. For example, Zestr lacks the item facet that LibraryThing has, which means that its users cannot find other users who own an item or attach notes or tags to it.
The greatest hurdle for a potential user of an inventory site is data entry--the site must make it worthwhile for a user to inventory the items he already has all at once (adding new items as they arrive is less tedious). LibraryThing does this by automating the data entry (via the Amazon API, for example), and by offering social aspects that improve as more data is entered. For example, LibraryThing will attempt to predict books a user might like based on the books she has already inventoried. CraftMemo, on the other hand, has no social aspect at all. The draw for a user is the ability to bundle craft supplies into hypothetical projects and to "see" what she owns without needing to rifle through drawers or closets. In both cases, it is handy for a user to maintain the inventory on a remote site. It saves him the trouble of setting up the database and allows him to see his collection anywhere he can find a networked computer.
In my summary, I predicted that this site genre would increase in popularity. As the Times article notes, it is handy for busy people to be able to keep track of what they have, wherever they may be. At the same time, the most growth could come from younger users, who express their identity to others in terms of their likes and dislikes, and are eager to assemble inventories of their belongings. As tools for quickly loading information improve (like the barcodes attached to wine bottles in the Times article), more people will consider it worthwhile to create inventories.
The popularity of these sites also points to something universal about the compulsion to catalog: it seems that even people who aren't librarians love to control their surroundings by creating and manipulating representations of items.
