Okay, I need to share another cool technology tool that I just found out about. And no wonder, since it’s very new. They just opened on August 29 and they’ve already had over 810,000 books cataloged. Anyway, the program is called LibraryThing. A clever name for a clever technology. :-)
LibraryThing allows you to catalog your books online. That’s cool enough for those of us who have rather large personal libraries. It allows you to search the Library of Congress and over 30 other major libraries around the world (including Amazon and its foreign language versions). Having access to all these libraries (along with the libraries listed in LibraryThing), we get more standardization of book titles and classification. (Maybe that kind of thing is only interesting to us librarians, but it IS cool!)

You can also share your list with others or keep it private if you like. They even have a “widget” that you can put in your blog to show what you’re “currently reading.” You can even rate your books from 1-5 like you do with songs on iTunes! Tags are also supported, so you can add tags to books just like you add them to pictures in Flickr or links in Del.icio.us. If you wonder what use tags would be, you can click a tag to find other books that have been given the same tag, so it helps you find new books you might not have known about.

Just for fun, you can click on the “Zeitgest” link and see list of the top 50 largest libraries in the system, the top 25 most-owned books, the top 75 authors, and lots of other lists. And of course every entry in every list is clickable!

Data can be imported and exported as you like, so you can print out a spreadsheet of your library or other versions of that list. Display is available both in list format and as a “graphical shelf,” which displays the cover images of your books. The list format for displaying your library is totally customizable with 19 different fields. One click on the column header sorts by that column. It’s VERY user friendly and very convienent. There’s even a “printable view” which only displays your content, omitting the control panel type of info on the web page.

Best of all, it’s cheap to free! You can create an account and list up to 200 books for free, and you get unlimited entry for a year for $10 or “for life” for $25! Visit http://www.librarything.com/ to check it out and get started with your own library.

Current music: A Day Without Rain, by Enya