Middlebury Friends Meeting

Quaker Reviews

The QuakerReviews site provides information on each pamphlet, as well as a review and a rating: title, author, publication date, subject categories, review, and rating. The site is searchable, and provides an alphabetical list of all the authors and of all the tags (subject categories). The reader can thus find any particular author, or tag, click on it, and obtain a page with all the pamphlet entries by that author or in that subject category. Also, the pamphlet entries can be sorted by order of the ratings (all the 5 star pamphlets listed first) or by alphabetical order of the tags (all those with the tag starting with A, e.g., Aging & End of Life, first), or alphabetically by author or by title, or by publication date (which produces the list in order of the pamphlet number as well).

The reviews are brief, describe the content, and assess the quality. The ratings range from zero to five stars, from poor quality to good to outstanding. The reviewer is Jean Rosenberg, of Middlebury Friends Meeting, in Vermont, USA.

QuakerReviews is a site on Librarything, which is a cataloging and social networking site where people and organizations can create their own site to catalog their books, contribute reviews and ratings, and share all this information. Many Quaker meetings use Librarything to catalog their libraries of books and pamphlets.

Getting to the QuakerReviews Site

To access the QuakerReviews site online, enter the following URL on your URL address line:

www.librarything.com/catalog/QuakerReviews

This takes you to the catalog pages; they contain all the entries on the Pendle Hill Pamphlets listed in order (whatever order the last user left them in; to rearrange them in another order see the instructions below). Or go to:

www.librarything.com/profile/QuakerReviews

This will bring you to the profile page for QuakerReviews; it explains a little about the reviewer, the ratings, and the site. Scroll to the bottom of this page where two URLs are given for this site, click on /catalog/QuakerReviews, and the catalog pages will open up. An alternative way to get to the QuakerReviews catalog: use your search engine to search for the key words:

QuakerReviews
librarything

A top result should be either the URL above, or

www.librarything.com/tags/QuakerReviews

The latter URL will take you to a QuakerReviews page listing all the tags on the site. Then click on the “list” button on the middle row above the tags list, which will open the catalog pages.

Using the QuakerReviews Site

Once you are on the catalog pages, you should see the first page of the entries of information and reviews on the pamphlets. If you do not see this, check the book collection that is open. On the top of any of the catalog pages, there are three rows of information and buttons; the middle row is a row of buttons for navigating in the QuakerReviews site. The far left button tells you which collection in QuakerReviews is open. It has a drop down menu to choose which collection to display; choose either “All collections” or “Pendle Hill Pamphlets”, but NOT “Your library.”

The entries can be arranged in several different orders: alphabetically by author or by title, by publication date, by rating (the number of stars), or various other things. If you would prefer a different order than what you see, you can rearrange the order by using the Sort button on the middle row above the catalog entries; this button is an icon of two arrows (one pointing up and one down) that is to the right of the Style buttons. Click on the Sort button to get a drop down menu of sorting criteria; choose the one you want. To the right of that, choose to have the order go Up or Down. Click on Sort, and the display order will be rearranged. For example, to see the pamphlets in order from the most recent to the earliest, choose “date of publication” and then “Down,” and then click Sort.

To look up the review, rating, and information on a particular pamphlet: to find the pamphlet by the author’s name, click on the Authors button on the middle row above the entries, and when the alphabetical list of authors comes up, click on that author. The entries on all the pamphlets by that author will be displayed. To find the pamphlet by the pamphlet number, rearrange the entries (see above) by date of publication, which will also arrange them by their number, and page through until you come to the one you want. You can also page through the entries if they are in order alphabetically by title, or author, until you come to the one you want. To page through quickly, look at the lower row above the catalog entries; at the far right you will see the number of catalog pages and which page is open. Estimate where the one you want would be among the page numbers, and click on that page number. Then go forward or backward by one or two pages at a time, using the “next page” or “prev page” button or the page number indicator on the far right, until you find the page with what you seek.

To find all the pamphlets that address a particular topic, click on the “tags” button on the middle row of buttons, and all the tags, or subject categories, will be displayed alphabetically. Look through them to decide what you are looking for, and then click on the one you choose. All the pamphlets with this tag will be displayed, with the entries arranged in whatever order the site is then set for (e.g., by publication date, or by author). Most pamphlets have more than one tag, since they address several of the topics, and they will be displayed under each of their tags.

Uses of QuakerReviews

The descriptions and assessments of the pamphlets in QuakerReviews can be useful to: