LibraryThing

It’s amazing what you find on the internet.

I was reading a blog about good blog design. As you do.

This led me to a series of blogs that seemed to be really well designed – naturally.

Clear. Easy to read. Interesting. Informative.

As they should be.

Then one had a listing of books the author had recently added to his Library Catalogue. This linked to another page called LibraryThing. It’s a library cataloguing system. Brilliant in concept, simple to use and so useful.

In another life I was a school librarian for eight years. I love books. I read every day. No day is complete without reading. I have a BIG and GROWING collection of books. So does my wife.

Every so often I have to make another bookshelf to hold all the books. We have books about birds, travel, gardening, plants, flowers, Christianity, reference, novels, picture books, humour, history and the list goes on.

Now I could very easily get hooked on cataloguing all our books. I’ve been threatening to do that for about 25 years. Now – where do I get all that time that would be necessary to achieve this worthwhile task?

Until then – I’ll just use shelve them like they’ve always been shelved – non-fiction in approximately subject order, fiction alphabetically by author.

And I’ll find them using the Biblical System – “Seek And Ye Shall Find.”