For the bibliophiles in the audience

I first ran across Library Thing a few years ago during a book club discussion. I checked it out, entered my 200 free books and then left it. But this summer I went back to it and got the lifetime membership.

Then I set about the task of entering all my books into the site. The search function is really flexible and I had few troubles finding the bibliographic information for the books I have on my shelf. For Canadian versions of books, I set the search to access Canadian databases. For American versions, I could search American versions. For obscure academic books, I could set the Library of Congress or a university library as my database. Overall, there were a few tricky books to find, but they were usually small press publications, and of course any independent or desktop publications weren't listed (though I don't have many of those). You can also upload and download to an Excel file if you already have a list of books.

The other interesting thing is that it tells you how many other members have the same book you do. It's been interesting seeing which books are the most popular and which ones only a handful of other people own.

Why did I do this?

Well, first off, because I like organizing things. I'm one of those people whose CDs are alphabetized, though my spice rack isn't - I have a life after all.

But my biggest motivation came from changing our insurance coverage in preparation for owning a home. As part of that preparation, I created an inventory of the household items, and came swiftly to two conclusions: a) the value of all my stuff greatly exceeded my current coverage (which we fixed), and b) no one is ever going to believe that I have that many books. I began to envision some insurance agent telling me after a fire "Ma'am, I don't believe that you had $20,000 worth of books in that house". Yes, that's the approximate value. No, I don't think it's exaggerated. I'd like to think it's less, but looking at it honestly, that's probably the value of it.

So if at any point you're looking for a way to catalogue your books, Library Thing's a great place to start. You can post 200 books for free. If you want to post more, you can buy a yearly, or a lifetime membership, both of which are very reasonably priced. So now, if God forbid, my library should ever be damaged, I can prove that yes indeed, it really was that big, and here's the list of what was in it...