Two words: barcode reader.
Categories: LibraryThing, obsession, technology
Archive for September, 2005
What a strangely productive weekend. Strange because I mostly did one thing for two days. Productive because the one thing I did was catalogue our book collection using LibraryThing. We now have SIX HUNDRED… enam ratus… å…百… 600… books listed! All this, despite the fact that the barcode scanner we borrowed from work didn’t work (it wouldn’t plug in).
I find LibraryThing so enjoyable to use that cataloguing our books doesn’t feel like a chore at all. I think it helps that when I get tired of one genre I switch to another. “Ugh, not more epistemology, let’s do erotica!” (Sadly, I have only found one volume of erotica so far, and at least fifty philosphy titles.)
I now know that we have forty three cookbooks, forty eight books in Malay (and mine is the only library on the LibraryThing system with books in Malay!) and seven books on Sweden - all Henning Mankell novels.
There are still shelves and shelves of books to get through. I wish I could stay home all week. I think I’m obsessed…
Categories: books, LibraryThing, Internet, technology, obsession
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.
Categories: books, LibraryThing, Internet, technology
