Three weeks after it was launched, we can say a little bit about MBooks collection builder usage. Right now, there are 47 public collections (more than half were created by LIT staff) and 170 personal collections.
I've done a little bit of rough assessment, and can report on the ten most-used MBooks collections (they are all public collections). Collection usage includes viewing the collection page, searching the collection, sorting the books in the collection, and copying items to another collection. It does not include searching or viewing the items within that collection -- tracking use of a book from a collection vs. from Mirlyn vs. from links from blogs was outside the scope of my quick-and-dirty analysis. Usage from our network range was not included in this assessment.
Here they are:
- Abraham Lincoln: Fact and Fable
- Great Britain
- Ann Arbor History
- How to be a Domestic Goddess
- Gothic literature
- Historical Bicycling
- Adventure Novels: G.A. Henty
- What It Was, Was Football
- Patents
- French Texts
Abraham Lincoln: Fact and Fable is twice as popular as the next-most popular collection, Great Britain, which is almost twice as popular as Ann Arbor History. As far as I can tell, none of these collections is linked from anywhere else except for the G. A. Henty Adventure Novels, which is included as a link in Henty's Wikipedia entry. Even with the minimal metadata presently available on the Public Collections page, people are finding and using collections that are interesting to them.