Library Thing

There's something new on my blog!!! Can you see it?? Look to your right!

Last week I stumbled upon Library Thing through a blog. I'd noticed people's books on their pages before but I didn't investigate. Well, I finally did and I'm so glad!

Library Thing is a way to organize and manage your books online. You go through and enter your books into Library Thing, which is connected to various databases like Amazon and Library of Congress. Most likely, your books are in one of these databases. You can then tag your book to make it easy to search topically - some of my tags are Christianity, Ancient, Primary, Saints - or you can organize your books by title or author with just one click of the mouse! The coolest thing is that you can see all your book covers, making it easy to find a book amidst the chaos of your physical "library."

Those of you who know me, know that (a) I have tons of books and (b) I love to organize. This was a dream come true for me. I tried it out by entering some of my history/Christianity books. I've entered 189 books and it really didn't take that long! You can enter 200 books for free and then it's either $10 a year or $25 for a lifetime membership to Library Thing. $25??!! I laughed when I first heard that! This is so incredible!

I was excited about this site for myself - of course - but it also made sense for work. My boss has an office filled with books. Literally - it's a big office and every wall is covered. My office is filled with his books as well. I'd thought about cataloging them - I'd even had an undergrad begin the task - but there was no good way to organize them. This site can solve that problem. My boss was ecstatic when I told him about it. He has a collection of Children's Books, pertaining to the Bible, and we've begun entering those into Library Thing as an experiment.

The only drawback with this system is that my boss has a lot of antique books and those are not going to be in the system. Actually, I'm amazed at what is in the Library of Congress. However, even if an antique book is in the LC, it usually does not have a cover on file. We have a lot of our covers scanned but not all of them. That's the only thing that will take some time.

So this has excited me a lot - as you can tell. I need to go ahead and pay the $25 so I can do my other 5 book cases! It's so much fun!