Thing 11 - LibraryThing

I have many diverse interests and have collected books since a child. I have old children's series books, historical fiction, illustrated classics and materials about hunting, guns and reenacting.

Thirty years ago, for my library school computer project, I created a catalog of my book collection because I would buy books - some very old and then discover I already owned them. At that time, the University of Maryland at College Park had a Univac Computer and I had to keypunch all of my data into specific fields using the FAMULUS software program. I keypunched about 6000-7000 IBM cards (many mistakes) and discovered I owned 1083 books. I still have the printed catalog, with additions and other changes in pencil. I typed 3 by 5 cards in the early 80s for more readable changes but never finished the project.

I created an account in LibraryThing. I will try it from home and compare it to the one I created with a free account a last year to see with which one is easier to work. Since many of titles in my collection are pre ISBN, I had to expand my search choices to other than Library of Congress and Amazon.com. At least one book out of the group I added; I searched for but no one seems to have a copy that I can discover. Ultimately, I will use one of the online catalogs to update my collection. I will see if I can take pictures with a digital camera and add them to the catalog. Also, I will decide at some point whether I want to open up my collection for viewing by others since I have so many old titles. One thing is clear. Computers have made bibliographic information so much more accessible and shareable. It is much easier to use the Internet to gather information for my books and edit it than it was to type those punch cards. I had to handle each book to collect author, illustrator, title, publisher, copyright and publication dates, how many illustrations the book contained and of which type, dust jacket, and how many pages. That information is readily available now and I should be able in most cases to just type in the title, possibly the author to add the work to the catalog.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/mgdonutman

I added LibraryThing to my RSS feed.