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.

Tagging

Well, I took a breath (figuratively) as suggested but all I was able to inhale was the smell of Mr Sheen as our cleaner had been polishing the furniture this morning. So once I had expelled the fumes from my lungs, I began to reread my previous posts.

I am a couple of weeks behind with my Things at the moment but there is method in my madness. I have been saving them all up for this week when I am at a bit of a loose end because of the Voyager upgrade. Very little Circulation, no Acquisitions and especially NO CATALOGING. Ah yes, a whole week without having to go through any old and very dusty, seemingly straightforward, volumes only to find that the benefactor who gave it to us (in an attempt to save themselves a few bob) had had bound several small books into one large tome. This is not so bad if all the parts have some connection to each other but when they are completely unrelated I have to create a note field the length of an essay to ensure all the relevant information can be retrieved. A hundred years ago people obviously never thought that one day some poor library assistant would have to computer catalogue their donation and still meet the bibliographic standard. Hmm ... maybe this upgrade is not such a bad thing after all.

So, back to tagging. I reread all of my previous posts and added some more subject-based tags as opposed to just Thing 1, Thing 2 etc. which was all that identified them previously. I can see how tags can lead people to your blog who otherwise would not have found it in the vast number of blogs that are out there. However, one of my labels in my blog about Twitter is "Winston Churchill" so anyone out there searching for information about the former prime minister and wartime leader might be disappointed by my distortion of one of his most famous quotes.

Categorization is necessary in library cataloguing as it means we all work to the same subject classification, although there are some libraries in the University which use alternatives to the Library of Congress. LC is very good but it has its limitations. I found this out several years ago when I back-catalogued all of the theses the Zoology Library has copies of. Because they are so specialized it was sometimes difficult to find appropriate subject headings so I had to settle for very generalized ones.