The LibraryThing thing

I continue to enjoy LibraryThing, even though my compulsion to catalogue our books has waned a bit since the first flush of novelty. I enjoy being able to see, in a neat list, what books we have, and it’s also strangely fun to find out what books other people have in common with yourself, and what books they have that you don’t. It’s almost as good as physically browsing someone else’s extensive collection.

There are a number of memes starting to develop based on people’s collections, which I am keen to do as well, but which I keep resisting because I want to finish cataloguing all our books first. At this stage practically all our fiction is done (just the short story anthologies left, as well as some poetry). The bulk of my Chinese language collection is still waiting to be done. I keep putting it off because many of them will need manual input (no ISBN barcodes!) and I need to be in the mood to work out some of the more complicated transliterations.

The bulk of our nonfiction is still waiting for acknowledgement on the shelves. And then there’s M’s computer books, which I started doing but gave up in a fit of pique because they’re in his study, and they’re big and heavy and I’m not supposed to leave them in a state of disarray.

For a while there our collection was in the list of 25 largest libraries, but the largest collection at the moment has 8,000 books in it so our 1600+ books don’t come close! I also once featured in the list of users with the most reviews written, but I need to pick up the pace again if I’m going to make the list. The problem is my sense of competitiveness is very vague, as in, most of the time, I’m not. I’m usually more content to Do My Best rather than Be The Best. I do occasionally have spurts where I want to be, and get to, the top of the class, but the mania tends to pass quickly. I think I have more fun that way, but could I be accused of being slack?

Anyway, I definitely rate LibraryThing as one of the Finds of the Year for me, along with Flickr and the Art of Early Rising. It’s been quite amazing how quickly the site has grown – there are at the moment a little over half a million books catalogued at LibraryThing. When I think that that is around how many books we have at My Place of Work (MPOW), it staggers me.

Categories: LibraryThing, books, Internet, technology, obsession