aeons ahead of my excel spreadsheets, Thing #11

Don't even giggle when you read this:

I have several times attempted to catalog my personal library using excel.

Every single time I have enjoyed myself immensely for about as long as one would enjoy cleaning out the garage. It felt amazing to actually be making a permanent record for posterity that I owned a copy of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Then I remembered that I've never read The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. I've also never read most of the A's I own. I though it would get better as I got to the B's... maybe the C's? SURELY I've read more of the D's! Apparently I'm a trophy book person? No, not really. I'm more of a checklist book collector. I figure if I build a fascinating library in my own home I'll never have to go book shopping or library browsing for what I want to read ever again.

Actually these thoughts are a bit outdated - I stopped buying books when I started being cheap and paying off debt about 8 years ago, so I have an OLD checklist library. This just gets worse and worse, doesn't it?

I'll stop wingeing about my own personal book collection now and rave about LibraryThing instead. My favorite thing about LibraryThing is definitely the ease of adding to your collection. Instead of typing the title, author, pub date, and all that jazz into my excel spreadsheet, I searched by author and clicked on all the Jim Harrison that lives in my house. I'm pretty sure I've told the world I own the paperback when I really own the hardcover at some point, but it was fast, and it was easy. LibraryThing has brought the world of shared bib records to the masses! Wonderful!

So aside from using LibraryThing to list your collection, what about those social aspects? I'm still unsure of them. I really am a consumer of information on the internet, even now. I 'm just not inspired to join in the fray. On the other hand, I might be inspired to try it if this is the kind of question you can find an answer to on LibraryThing: "Recommendations on reading Kleist?"

So if there's one thing I like about new communication tools, it's the ability to find a like mind for your apparently random and/or obscure question. So yes, go on and find out where to start with Kleist. I can tell you where to start if you want to read some Jim Harrison. :)

Click here to see my library (so far!)