Home library catalog(ue)s

In My Humble Opinion
1

Has anyone here used one of those sites that you can use to catalogue your home library? I’m aware of three:
Library Thing
Goodreads
Shelfari

Of those, I used Library Thing for a while, until it made a mess of a file of ISBNs that I gave it, and I couldn’t be bothered to go through sorting out the mess. But, if you don’t try to over-automate the process, it seems to work well.

Have any dopers used any of these, or anything similar? Any pros or cons, or other general advice?

2

I use Library Thing, but only log in about 2x a year. I mainly use it to find people who overlap a large percentage of books I’ve read to see if there are any similar books to read.

Oh, and I maintain my own list of all the books I’ve read since 1999. So that’s why I use it infrequently.

Overall when it comes to books, I’m interested in keeping track of

  1. names of books - so I won’t read the same book unintentionally.
  2. year book was read - so I can trend how many books a year I’ve read
  3. short description - so I can remind myself of things I didn’t like. It’s also useful for when a friend asks me for a recommendation I can read some of the titles and think if they would enjoy it. I go to the library a lot so I can’t just consult a bookshelf.

I think the advantage of librarything that my own list does not directly list is:

  1. as i’ve said, recommendations based on readers with similar interests
  2. quickly searching of books by your favorite authors that you have not read. I’ve read about 2/3 of Kurt Vonneguts books but have trouble remembering which ones.
3

I too need lists to keep from buying multiple copies of books. I wonder if anyone has a recommendation for a database software (free) to use or a format in Excel? or how to organize this list. I see software that does these things but it’s more complex than I need. I used to use a really basic database program called I think PCFiler (not sure of that one) long ago and it was great, very simple to use. I once tried to look at Microsoft Access? oooh how horrible that was. A free or cheap basic database program would work for me; suggestions?

4

We just made lists in Excel, to organize Mom’s library.

I don’t have the file here, but it was:

  1. One sheet per room, plus we may make a temporary “global” one occasionally. We save the file with the rooms separated, though.
  2. Each line is something like:
    Room-Location within room-Author-Title-Editorial-Collection-Number within Collection

We didn’t bother with ISBN or any of that. As of last count she had managed to stay below 4K books. When I started the list, she thought she had “about 2K:” nope, turned out to be more than 3K.

5

I’ve been very happy with Library Thing. It made it a snap to arrange all my non-fiction books (close to a thousand of them) by the Library of Congress cataloging system. No more hunting around for books for a half hour because I can’t remember where I shelved them under my previous idiosyncratic system. I don’t often need it any more, but I downloaded a copy of my catalog to my Kindle to help with the hardest-to-find titles.

6

Thanks for the replies. It looks like most dopers either don’t have many thousands of books, or have a photographic memory so that they don’t need to catalogue them :slight_smile:

7

I’ve used Library Thing but found that I like Goodreads, better, so I use that far more often. I have cataloged the books I own, books I’ve read, and books I want to read, which is quite an extensive list at the moment.

I like Goodreads because it’s more user friendly (for me anyway) to have lists, read reviews, rate books, and connect with other readers.

8

You are excluding the most obvious alternative:

“Fuck, I could have sworn I had that book around here somewhere!”

Perhaps that’s just me, though. :wink:

9

I joined Library Thing back when it was still beta testing. But I admit I never made a good effort to keep my list updated.

10

Having a library catalog is absolutely useless if you can’t find the book.

We can never find the bloody book.

My wife is a librarian.

11

My photographic memory got overexposed about 30 years ago. :slight_smile:

I started using the Star Office Database, version 5, but they have changed it around so much as to be unusable. None of the library oriented ones work for me since half my collection is magazines. I finally decided to just use a spreadsheet, which is excellent for my magazines, since I can cut and paste the information for years worth of runs in a few seconds, and then just check to see if the publisher screwed up the numbering.
I have no trouble finding stuff on my shelves, my problem is remembering whether or not I own something I haven’t read yet.

Another advantage of the spreadsheet format is that I can write Perl scripts after I’m done entering stuff to build want lists. I can also move it to the web, where I can check what I’m missing using my Droid. That’s the ultimate.