Well, it took a few hours (spread over the past few days) of free-time puttering, but my entire book collection (that isn’t loaned out, loaned out and not returned, lost, or still sitting somewhere at my folks’ house in Anchorage) is now entered into my LibraryThing catalog.
A paltry 373 books in total. Meh. I thought I’d be doing better than that…but then, I know there’s quite a bit that’s missing for one reason or another (books I remember having that aren’t there, series that are only half-complete, and other similar things). Still, it’s not a bad overview of my reading habits.
I may end up creating another account for Prairie and cataloging her collection also. That particular project is going to wait for a little while at least, though…getting mine done in two days is a good enough accomplishment for now.
I’d like to like LibraryThing, but I just don’t get it. The appeal of having a catalog of my books would, for me, be the ability to know where those books are: are they on the shelves in the dining room, living room, computer room, kitchen? Loaned out to a friend? If I loaned them, when, and to who? Did I take it to Bellingham at Thanksgiving and forget to bring it back?
I don’t see that LibraryThing supports that sort of thing. Am I missing something obvious, or is that just not what it’s about?
Well, while there’s no “location” field built into LibraryThing, there are certainly ways to do that via the tagging system. For instance, while I’m not tracking location, I’ve seen people who are — wenestvedt‘s tag cloud includes several
zloc:tags, for instance — and I’m using the tags to track books I’ve entered that are borrowed from Prairie (and others, should I borrow books from other people), and plan on using tags to track books I’ve loaned out, too.So even if the functionality you’re looking for isn’t specifically built into LT, it’s there if you want to use it.