Every week, there are dozens of breathless new ideas about how to make use of the internet. Now and again, there is a real gem with tremendous potential. I believe that Library Thing is just such an idea.
Type in a few words from the title of a book in the search box and hit "Enter". The site searches Amazon and the Library of Congress catalogue as well as others. You then select the item which matches the book on your shelf and it is added to your "Library". All the details are included - author, title, date, publisher ISBN etc. It is amazing how quickly it is possible to catalogue a dozen or so books. You can export your "Library" to a file, import from other files, put a widget on your blog etc. The service is free for 200 books and after that it is $10 per year or $25 life membership.
I'll be using this big-time as it is the first practical answer to cataloguing me library without taking a six month sabbatical. I will be doing a shelf at a time. Going through the first Patristics shelf, I found that one or two books didn't show up but I was surprised at how many did.
This site is likely to be a big hit with Catholic bloggers who seem mostly to be quite avid bookworms. Very grateful hat tip to Dilexit Prior at Letters from a Young Catholic.
11 comments:
Mostly it is pretty cool and I have used it in the past. What I would like is the ability to add books you want to get and then be able to have a report with that information.
What I want to know is, how many life memberships did you have to sign up for...?
(after checking your library, they may decide to alter their pricing schedule!)
;-)
Need to do something with my books..am tripping over them!
Will Father be giving us the chance to persue his library by linking his catalogue on his blog?
Hey - all Catholic bloggers! I've created a group on the Library Thing for us, so that we can all get some ideas on our reading material! Search for the group "St. Blog's Parish Community"
It's going to take me awhile to get my own collection totally up, and I never realized before what a random collection of books I have!
It's free mac. Yay. Free is best. Of course you can upgrade for money if you want - but I'm poor and cheap.
Thanks for the hat tip Father.
Also, check out the tool called CueCat at LibraryThing. It's a USB-device that scans the ISBN barcode of your books and so you can catalog them much faster...
Genius. I've been using the Amazon wishlist function for so long now and it leaves a lot to be desired. Thanks.
Barcode scanning! That's another gadget to add to the list :-)
DP - the problem is that I have more than 200 books so I am going to have to pay soon enough. It's only free for the first 200. H/T only just - this was a great find.
Dear Father, (a remotely related comment). I use a few blogs like yours as an archive of news and events (as you kindly do all the groundwork for us), and should like to know how I can use the tags you assign things under to retrieve past posts and links, rather than having to trawl through months and months of archives.
(In view of the 5th June vote, I happened to be looking for your posts on the RCN's recent paper about more and more junior doctors opting out of training as abortionists, as I believe that you were one of those who commented on this, and had links to a broadsheet or two. (I suspect that my MP might benefit from seeing this argument too). So you could use the tag 'abortion' as an example.
Sorry to be such a luddite. Fiona
The idea is that you can click on a tag and get all the posts that are tagged. Unfortunately it doesn't work very well. I think it limits the number of articles shown but I recall seeing a hack somewhere to get round this. When I get time, I will use a hack that lets you just show the first few lines of posts in the archive or tag - that would make them easier to scan.
The tag for abortion would be "pro-life" which I use both for positive pro-life articles and for articles criticising the culture of death.
Another useful tool is the search box at the top of the blog which works quite well - I often use it to find my own posts!
I'm very glad that the blog is useful in your work and will try to find time to make it more usable as an archive.
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