Library Thing

Part of our Home Library

I have a lot of books. Ok, so that is probably an understatement.
We have our own library at home - covering probably about every subject you could think of.

I am not complaining about this. I love books! If I actually had to have a "real" job, I would probably want to be a genealogist or a librarian. Luckily, I have a wonderful husband who allows me to stay at home and be the librarian of my own personal library :)

I have my books in "order" separated by subject: science, history (in order from the beginning of time of course), foreign languages, literature, geography, art, math, language arts, poetry etc. The problem is that I still end up not finding the book I want (or not even realizing that I own it) until it is too late.

Here is a good example: We have been studying Jewish holidays all week and we were using this tiny picture book, supplementing with online material and Bible readings. Today, while I was busy cataloging my books into Library Thing, I found the PERFECT book for this past week's studies (which we are of course done with). It is called Celebrate: Stories of the Jewish Holidays by Gilda Berger and it is exactly what I should have used. For each holiday, it gives the story behind the holiday and then a number of wonderful activities and recipes to complement your studies. Why didn't I find this sometime last week? Why didn't I even know that I owned it? Because it was hidden on the geography shelf and I didn't know to look for it.

So, now I am feverishly entering my books into Library Thing. They have free memberships for up to 200 books, but I'm already at over a thousand and am not even close to being done. It was $25 for a lifetime membership and that is well worth it to me. You can enter your books in by title/author or ISBN. They also have a gadget you can buy to scan in the barcodes and it does the work for you. I am doing it manually :)

The cool thing is that once you have your books entered in, you can add tags to them. A single book can have a variety of different tags. This is going to help me out SO much, because I will be able to look ahead at what we are studying, and I can click on the tag I want and see a list of books that pertain that subject (ie. reptiles, constellations, Ancient Greece). I can also look by type of book (ie. chapter book, easy reader etc.). The possibilities are endless. I will be tagging away once I have finished adding them all.

You can also share your bookshelf on your blog through a Library Thing widget :) (Look on my left sidebar). There are further perks available on their site: reviews, recommendations, forums etc., but I haven't had the chance to explore them yet.

What are you waiting for?