Friday, November 7, 2008

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?

2 comments:

Christina said...

This is too cool: a library catalogue of your own. We are avid readers ourselves and own a gazillion books because neither Mark or I can leave a bookstore with less than a dozen books a piece. Plus I drool over every Scholastic flier that comes home with the kids, searching for titles I remember loving as a kid... If only we had been able to bring them all with us! Sadly, our books, most of them, went into storage. They were just too heavy for our very limited housing weight allowance to Korea. :(

Shynea @ Penny Pinching Diva said...

I am so jealous of your book collection. I wish I had a fraction of that at home. I love to read, and I would always be curled up in a corner with a book.