Week 8, Thing 19: Library Thing

I really like Library Thing. I've always wanted to have a list or a reference of all my books. When I was in middle school/early high school, I had a card file of all my books. The were in alphabetical order according to title. Sometimes, I even had a little summary. (There really is no other profession for me.) I can only imagine how excited I would have been if Library Thing would have been around back then!

I signed up for Library Thing a while ago and added a couple of books. I put a few more on this summer when we looked at the Web 2.0 Award sites. My only complaint is that I can't pull up an author, choose a number of titles and batch process the selection all at once. As a reader who tends to collect books by certain authors, that capability would be enormously convenient.

Here's a question though, do you only put in the books that make you look good or do you put in all your books, even if they're not exactly award winners? Case in point - when I first started looking at other people's blogs, some have this really cool widget, shelfari, where books are placed on a virtual shelf for all to see. Great, except as I looked a couple of people's "bookshelves", they were reading "important" books and I was reading to escape. I don't think I'll be a literary snob when it comes to Library Thing because the purpose is to list my books, pure and simple.

There a few of my students who would enjoy Library Thing and I'm definitely going to put a link on our library web page.

I'm going to put both the Library Thing and the Shelfari widgets on my blog because what I own and what I read can be very different.