#11 Library Thing (Marian the Librarian)

I've been a fan of Library Thing for a while now and have been slowly cataloguing the "tapsister" collection onto it.

It's actually rather scary to see how many books I (allegedly according to Library Thing) own. It seems so much less when you see them on a bookshelf (or two, or three, or...)

Which is why, for the purpose of this exercise, I've started a new account just for my family history related titles.

My sister and I wrote the history of dad's family about 20 years ago and we are currently (still) updating it. When we first wrote it we had to photocopy photos into it as digital cameras (and scanners) were not readily available.

Now we can scan all the photos in and include them in the middle of the relevant text rather than having to stick a photo on a page of text and then photocopy it numerous times.

Relatives overseas can scan in family photos and email them to us for inclusion in the book rather than having to photocopy and post us a copy.

We can (and do) also upload photos to Flickr and ask the rellies worldwide if they can identify the people in the photos for us. We seem to have a lot of old photos that have the identity of the person written on the back.

Unfortunately it is usually just a one word identifier such as dad, mum, or Robert. (whose dad, whose mum, which Robert?).

We then get sidetracked (rather like this post!) into trying to date the photos using the clothing and hairstyles as a guide.

But back to Library Thing.

It is free for the first 200 books. After that it's us$10 for a year or us$25 for lifetime membership. Or if you're too cheap to pay, or too lazy to pay, you can set up multiple accounts eg: by genre: miffy_crime, miffy_travel, etc. It takes some keeping up with but it is definitely do-able.

There is a LibraryThing for libraries which explains why a library would want to join LibraryThing and links to a few libraries which have already joined.

The Bedford Public Library inTexas is one public library which is on LibraryThing. At the bottom of the catalogue record is a list of all the tags that have been applied to that title. So by clicking on a tag you can link to other titles that have that tag as well - way cool.

A rather easy way to get a list of 'who writes like' or 'if you enjoyed this book you might enjoy such n such' recommendations.

Could be useful...