LibraryThing

Creating order in my personal library is something that has remained on my to-do list for many years. With an eye to creating an appearance of design in the chaos of my collection I took the opportunity afforded me by the recent completion of renovations to the house to start anew and reorganize the bookshelves. First, to compile an inventory: “did I really buy three copies of that book?” “Did I borrow that and forget to return it?” Second, I wished to reacquaint myself with some old favourites and to pull out those “must-reads” that were purchased over the years but were assigned to book boxes during moves or the fringes of the collection due to scarcity of reading time. Third, the project would provide the opportunity to impose order and to test out some of the library skills I had recently acquired.

Luckily, I remembered a great piece of social networking software that would help with the project. LibraryThing.com provides one with an easy to use cataloguing tool and lets you share your love of books with a larger reading community. With over 7 million books catalogued and over 100,000 members LibraryThing lets you browse the huge catalogue for your favourite authors. If you enter your own collection, a simple process that involves typing in an author or title or ISBN and finding your book in a list from Amazon.com or the Library of Congress or some other major library –then just “click” to enter -- you can look at collections that are similar to your own to see what someone else might be enjoying. The site will also generate reading suggestions based on what you have in your collection. You can use RSS Feeds or widgets to add random lists of your books to a Blog, just like the one on the right. Members of the community offer reviews and ratings of books and the Zeitgeist Page offers lists such as highest rated authors and most reviewed books.

While the actual physical arrangement of your books on your bookshelves may reflect the unique connections between the books that only you can truly appreciate, LibraryThing.com lets you create virtual order with electronic alphabetically listed authors or titles or genres. And, keyword tags give you the opportunity to sort into any number of categories.

While busily engaged in the process of cataloguing my collection my daughters, ever curious, were drawn by my interest and were themselves immediately hooked on LibraryThing. There are definitely two more avid readers in the house. Maybe there are two more librarians too?