Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Thing 11

LibraryThing is pretty sweet. I wish this had been around a couple of decades ago when I had a pretty serious collection. Now, I don’t have a “library”. I gave all my books to my daughter because I got tired of lugging them around every time we moved (which was nearly every two years when I was in the Army). Of course, now that my daughter is off to college the whole collection is back and stuffed in the back of her closet. Oh well, I guess I can lug it around a few more times for her.

To complete Thing 11 I added a few of the books I remember having in my collection. I believe my daughter still has them although the pure sci-fi books don’t get much use anymore. Here’s the link to my LibraryThing collection.

I found it to be pretty easy except for a few minor annoyances. One, it’s hard to find the older prints of books. I have a 1987 print of Dune by Frank Herbert but I could never find the associated item entry (plus, none of the cover pictures match the book covers I have). Also, when I was adding books from a series such as Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality, I wish there were some way to simply go back to the previous search results list. Having to search every time was time consuming, particularly if you had gone several pages into the list to find the appropriate entries.

All in all, LibraryThing is pretty cool. Is there something like this for my music collection?

2 comments:

  1. I don't know of one for music, but this site is very cool & similar to LibraryThing in its suggestion capabilities:
    http://www.liveplasma.com/

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  2. I mentioned this to you in person, Gary, but I'll add it here as well.

    For adding large collections, you can create a database file with all of your ISBNs and import them in a batch. There's information on how to do that on the WikiThing:
    http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Adding_and_importing_books

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