LibraryThing


Books!
Originally uploaded by CW.

I got carried away playing with LibraryThing this morning. It’s like Flickr for books. I don’t know how I missed it, since people have been talking about it for some weeks now, but anyway. I started with it yesterday morning, and to date have catalogued 150 books already! Seeing as I estimated that I have some 2180 books (and the number has slowly increased since that estimate), it’s going to be an interesting process…

LibraryThing is extremely easy to use. To catalogue a book, you can search for it using its ISBN, title or author’s name. In most cases several choices – different editions, covers, translations – appear, and you choose the one that matches the book in your hand. You can tweak the details and add more information if you like. LibraryThing uses data from the Library of Congress and various Amazons (US, UK, Canada, etc). Where your book is not listed, you can add the details yourself. (I think this is going to be the challenge for my Chinese and Malay language collections.)

You can write comments or reviews for each book – I might start going annotating my books as I upload them. LibraryThing also shows you when your book is also owned by other people, and you can browse their libraries.

The system allows you to tag or categorise each book – this I think is going to be the challenging and interesting part: trying to work out what a book is about. In many cases it is quite easy to work this out, but not always. I say this as a librarian who is bad at cataloguing. I don’t do much of it at work – my main sole contribution is when Chinese, Malay or Indonesian language materials arrive at the Library, and I help the cataloguers decipher and transliterate the bibliographic details.

LibraryThing is like a dream come true for me – I have always wanted to catalogue my books but it’s always been too hard, and too time consuming. It’s free for the first 200 books; a paid account will set you back the low, low price of US$10 – for a lifetime account. By the end of yesterday evening I was a paid up member.

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5 Comments

tfp 15 September 2005

Oooh, I might have to play with Library Thing myself. But just the thought of going through all my books makes me tired!

m 16 September 2005

If you check out http://www.librarything.com/users.php the top user only has 1600 books! Are we going to top the list? 🙂

cherryripe 16 September 2005

Hmmm… tempting! I just have to get all the books out of the boxes first, though… Like tfp the mere thought is knackering!

anna 16 September 2005

what a great idea, this LibraryThing. I’ve mucked around with it just then (from your link) and it really is addictive.

CW 16 September 2005

tfp, I know what you mean. I am going to make the most of it while the novelty is still there 😛 I am quite encouraged by the fact that it didn’t take very long to do 160-odd books!

M, I reckon we are! (Is it a competition?? 😛 )

Cherry, it hasn’t been knackering so far .. fingers crossed!

Anna, it is addictive, innit? 🙂