Eating lunch leads to Library Thing
Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 10:35pm
Last night Kirrily mentioned that she had created a flowchart about eating lunch at your desk so tonight I went off to find it on her Geek Etiquette site. Anyone who works in a shared office will see the truth in it, however I feel it is missing something. It doesn’t cover the case where you have a lunch that is stinkiest while being reheated and you take back to your desk because you do not want to eat in the now stunk out kitchen…
In the process of all this I checked out Kirrily’s profile on Library Thing. I started thinking that, although I built my own simple catalog, this could be useful in the same way that del.icio.us has been for my bookmarks. So I created an account…
…to find that I had already done so when I first got my barcode scanner and forgotten about it. The couple of books that were in the account were the ones that I had used when first playing around with a catalog of my own.
After I saw that the import function could extract ISBNs from an arbitrary chunk I test I copy and pasted the output from my catalog into it. 449 ISBNs were found and it is added 202 of them to my catalog as 200 is the limit for a free account (is that a boundary error?). Even though it does not satify my fundamental need for a catalog I may still pay the US$25 for a lifetime membership as it is yet another way to have an internet presence.
So what is my fundamental need for a catalog? Sorting by series and series order.
Along with the title, author and ISBN of each novel, I also have a series name and a number to represent the place the novel has in the series. Sorting by author, series, series number, then title gives me a list with two benefits; first it makes it easy to see which books in a series I do not have, and second, when printed out, this made rearranging my bookshelves signifigantly easier as I prefer to have them in chronological order.
Now that my bookshelves are mostly in order the second benefit is no longer as important and it limits the catalog to novels. I have plenty of other books that I should catalog.
Heh. I just discovered http://bookmooch.com/ tonight. Been adding a few things I want to get rid of. It’s not as slick as LT though.
K.
Kirrily - May 10th, 2007 at 11:11 pm