LibraryThing

Yes, would you like to buy a book?

by Oolong

I like LibraryThing. I think it's a very easy (and cheap) way of cataloguing a personal collection of books without having to add too much information yourself. You just type in the author, title or ISBN and it does all the searching for you. A list appears of all the books that could match your search term, you click on the one you want and hey presto!, all of the book details are added to your individual catalogue. This is especially useful for someone with the complete collection of a particular author's works. They only have to do one search and can cherry-pick all of the titles they need. I experimented with Agatha Christie and came up with over 8,000 results from Amazon. This includes all of the different reprints, formats, changes of title and omnibuses. I like the links with Amazon which provide reviews of the book and also suggestions for similar books and authors which readers may not have heard of. If you find someone else with similar reading tastes, you can check out their catalogue and chat with them. You can swap recommendations which in turn leads to new books and other readers ad infinitum.

As a tool for a library, I think it would be more useful in advertising the books we have bought recently. We have nearly 20,000 books and even with the ease with which a catalogue can be built, it would take a long time to produce a retrospective record, especially when you have to add your own tags. It would perhaps suit a smaller library better, one that doesn't want to spend a lot on a system or have to catalogue to a prescribed standard.