Wednesday 25 August 2010

That Library Thing

LibraryThing – day 2

Last night I stayed up late until I had  catalogued the whole of one shelf of my specialist collection of books mainly about the Wicca and related subjects. Today I have gone on. I’ve now entered 140 titles including some copies received when I was otherwise too occupied to deal with them. They been safely coddled up in their postal wrappers until this afternoon. Now I know what they are and where I can find them and write reviews of them.

I can also see the usual computer thing has happened. I started off using LibraryThing as an easy way of building a database of my rambling collection of books. Already I am able to cross-reference to similar titles available ‘out there’, plus information about the author of each title and the other titles from each workstation. There’s also the possibility of seeing how many other LibraryThing subscribers also have copies of a each discrete volume. But that’s something I’ve not yet delved into though I’ve just noticed that Hugh Bowden (Mystery Cults in the Ancient World [2010]) and I have three titles in common. 7,495 of us have copies of The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009). No one else owns up to a copy of Rhythmic Proportions in Early Medieval Ecclesiastical Chant (1958). Why am I not surprised?

© francis cameron, oxford, 25 august 2010

Posted via email from franciscameron's posterous

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