LibraryThing

Having just repainted my living room and freshly restocked the bookshelves, I knew the "first row" had some great stuff. I pulled a stack and went to the computer. The easiest signup ever gave me my LibraryThing account, and then it's time to add books.

First up, "American Scenery" from 1840. This has sentimental value. LibraryThing finds it at the Library of Congress. No cover art, which makes sense because it was published as a serial. NYPL has it in their digital library. I did some scans for a school project that are better than the NYPL scans I looked at - "Lake Winnipisseogee, from Red Hill is my one of my favorites.

Next up, "The Book of the Tarpon". I love this book, with its many early photos of tarpon fishing. I run into a little problem with LibraryThing; it doesn't show edition or publication date when it finds multiple instances at Library of Congress. It shows a field as "(date?)" when in fact the metadata does have dates. I find my 1911 edition by picking both and drilling down. Could be better.

On my next book, "A Geographical View of the World Embracing the Manners, Customs and Pursuits, of Every Nation", I strike out completely. It's a pretty rare title, I guess, since it's not at Library of Congress or in WorldCat or in LT. Still, AbeBooks has four copies for sale. I don't see a way to use AbeBooks for book discovery. Once you have a found item you can look it up there; why not hit it for discovery too? I do like the feature to add more sources; the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was particularly welcome as I have a lot of maritime material.

My next addition is another favorite, U.S. Naval Astronomical Expedition to the Southern Hemisphere. This is in the U.S. Serial Set collection at Library of Congress. It's a multi-volume set with wonderful maps, illustrations, illustrations, and descriptions of South America circa 1850. LT works well; again I'm the first with the book.

Number Five. I was going to do another tough one ("The American Ship-Master's Guide and Commercial Assistant, Being an Enlargement of the Seaman's Manual Useful to Merchants, Ship-Masters, Consuls, Supercargoes, Mariners and Merchant's Clerks", 1838) but what's the point? Let's see if there's some social networking around contemporary stuff.

Let's look at Mark Bowden's "Black Hawk Down." I don't own it but it's a good book. Much better metadata; editions more clearly defined; and cool networked effects. "Swap this book" shows me a store that will take my supposed copy, presumably in trade for something else? Tried to use BookMooch but it needs another registration. Yeah, right. "Conversations" link had a few outdated threads; probably much more active on a newer title. The one thing that impressed was the social information / recommendations machine; I had read 13 of the 20 titles on the list. Yeah, we are all unique, just like everyone else :)

Looking around a little more, I find the BookSuggester - how much are we paying Thomson Gale for What Do I Read Next? I'll have to do some searching and find a comparison. Seriously good tools in the tools tab, and then there's LibraryThing for Libraries. I sent away for some info; we'll see where it takes us.

I've been reading about this for a while. Now I see why! Very nice.