Just about every librarian will eventually get THE question, either from a patron, friend or family member, that is, "How do I catalog my personal book collection?" Okay, it's even occurred to me that an inventory of my eclectic mix of dog books, mysteries and tech-type titles might come in handy, or at least it would allow me to feel as organized at home as I am at work. At any rate, we haven't always had a good solution for our favorite bibliophiles. Until now, that is. Enter, Library Thing, a cross between a library OPAC, and Amazon.com with hints of social web sites such as Flickr and FURL.
Steve Cohen has been talking about Library Thing for a while now, and it gets his vote for his favorite tool of 2005. I can see why. There are other similar web sites out there, but as far as I can see, none of them support tagging AND LC subject headings with call numbers, offering the best of both worlds, at least from a librarian's standpoint.
It's easy to get started. An account including up to 200 titles is free. After that, the cost is $10 per year, or $25 for life. Life is a long time, perhaps not so long in the internet world, so it's good to know you can get your data out of a site as well as into it by exporting your titles to a text, csv format, which is easy to open and manipulate in Excel.
Once you've set up your account, just search by dropping in title keywords, author, possible tags, etc., just as you would in Amazon. Should you be so lucky as to have an ISBN number, you can search by that as well.
By the way, if you want to share your catalog, you can, but it's not required. You can edit your profile to keep your collection private. But that does kind of miss the point. Swapping book interests with the Library Thing community is part of the fun.
What Library Thing really needs is a circulation system. I never cataloged my book collection when I was a kid, but I DID institute a simple card and pocket . What better way to keep track of who it is that hasn't returned my recently read Sue Grafton mystery. A Christian Science Monitor article suggests using the comment field just for this purpose.
Okay, this begs the question, how about a "library" version of 'Library Thing" to make cataloging fun and easy at work as well as at home? Sorry, but I just had to ask....
I have been wanting to play with Library Thing since I first heard about it - but where do you find the time to sit down and catalog all of your books? This is the ultimate question :)