LibraryLove

Everyone who's been telling me about LibraryThing, you were SO right. I love it!

Comments

[lori]

I am frustrated that I cannot get an idea of the level of data entry-ness without signing up for a membership. I really don't want to spend hours of my life cataloguing my books, or I'd've done it already.

[badgerbag]

The data entryness is amazingly easy. Amazingly. And the signup process was the easiest I've ever experienced - cleverly, signin and registration are the same, so you type a name and password and if you haven't been there before under that name, it registers you under it without any fuss or further information demanded.

I was impressed with the range of book info: for the 15 or so books I entered (and it took me 5 minutes) it FOUND them all. I would type "motherlines" and a couple of tags like "femsf, sf, feminist" and it very quickly popped up a bunch of choices and editions - then you click on the one. voila. It's a very slick, smart, effortless user interface.

Yes, it would still take me countless hours to put in all my books, but I think even a subset of books would be interesting and useful... somehow. Possibly it's a pointless timesink and exercise in vanity, but wow, a fun one. It also seems to have excellent data import and export cababilities, though I haven't tested this yet. The thing is, their sources (library of congress! Amazon! Amazon from other countries! various other big libraries!) are great. obscure old books published in guatemala... I found them with two clicks and no heinous long wait for page load or db search. very fast and slick.

Er, sorry, could I be any more gung-ho?

When I say "useful" I guess at this point I imagine it might be nice to look at the books of the 2 other people on there who report owning "Feminist Research Methods" or whatever. It might also be useful for me to think about what my areas of knowledge ARE and how they interrelate. I'm not sure yet.

[Elkit]

Awwww man! Did you *have to* go and tell me about this? *sigh*
[signed up already.]

[elswhere]

I signed up but haven't been able to deal with the thought of the data-entry. Heck, I can't even keep up with my blog or sidebar these days. But one day!

[Iris]

You seem to have Ph1lip Pullman as one of your few named books. I am so disappointed .. I thought that you .. like me .. despised the stupid f.cker. (This Library thing could obviously lead to much exciting revelation and conflict).

[patty (awesmom on librarything)]

Yay! I got you! And others too...

It's funny with the different viewpoints on inputting the data. I guess Elswhere's excused, because she must do something like this all day at work. For me, I'm a bit obsessed with putting new books in my Librarything account. I gave my kids a crazy amount of books for Christmas, and I literally couldn't wait to sit down and enter them all. (They're all tagged under xmas gift 2005.)

I haven't finished with all of the books in my house, but when I was working on a shelf a day, I really had to stop myself. And now I have to fight my ten year old, who wants to put in her own books. Grr.
9No, that's why I bought you a new book, so I could run home and enter the ISBN.) So those of you with kids, they can be trained to do the data entry for you!

[anderson parker]

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[Data Entry At Home dot com]

Yep LibraryThing is an awesome resource. I've been using it for quite some time and I just keep coming back!