Wednesday, March 12, 2008

LibraryThing

I know, I know ... those of you world-weary, long-time bloggers and book-loving, computer-savvy folk ... this is nothing new for you. In fact, I even distantly remember discussions about LibraryThing in comparison to other online book cataloguing sites. But for me (because I just discovered it) it's a Cool New Toy.

You'll notice if you scroll down a bit on my blog that I have a "From the Bookshelf" thingie on the left side. That's from my list of books at LibraryThing! (Though I wish I could take credit for the cool html coding that makes the book covers change every time you visit. Alas, LibraryThing assumes that folks don't all do computer kungfu and offer it to you in a nice, simple copy-and-paste version.)

You can share book lists, browse other's lists, find folks with similar interests, write reviews, and even - this is what sold me - link to the Library of Congress and add a call number to your list. And if you wanted to be even more nerdy, you can buy a scanner and scan your book barcodes in directly. Wow. I'm going to show this to the philosopher... {{wicked grin}} ...this will put his excel spreadsheet to shame.

2 comments:

J said...

Ooooooooo!! Cool stuff! I'll have to add it onto mine too! I'll bet that my prettier half will probably do the same.

One of the things that C signed up for was Library Elf. It takes your library card number and can be used with a very wide selection of libraries (one of which is our county library system) to send us emails of all the books that we have requested, checked out, waiting for us, overdue, etc.

It's very handy to keep track of what's going on without going to the library website and logging on to check the various pages.

Zana said...

That's cool too! I may have to look into that myself! 8-)