We are deeply grateful to long-time contributor James Keeline for the following Guest Editorial....
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I've had an account on LibraryThing since 2007 but haven't used it much until this past week. My wife and I organized a closet with many crates of books and wanted to keep track of these as well as more recent books to prevent us from buying duplicates. Of course the next thought is cataloging all of the books in this system.
In about a week I've added just under 2500 books. I already had a USB "modified" CueCat scanner so entering the modern books with 978 bookland ISBN barcodes is fairly easy. Some paperbacks place the bookland barcode on the inside of the front cover. A few hardcovers have them hidden on one of the jacket flaps:
When a book does not have a bookland barcode, the next best option is to manually enter the ISBN number. In most cases this will bring up a matching book record if the appropriate data source is being used. The three main ones are Amazon, OpenCat, and Library of Congress. Amazon works best with a barcode scanner since many can be found with the ISBN-13 bookland barcodes. LOC does not have this data even though many books can be found with ISBN-10 numbers manually entered. LibraryThing does not yet automatically convert ISBN-13 to ISBN-10 when a data source only uses ISBN-10. I hope this feature will be added in the future.
ISBNs (International Standard Book Number) began to be used around 1970. Immediately before that there was the SBN (Standard Book Number). A 10-digit ISBN looks like this: 0-123-45678-9.
The dashes are helpful to break up the data into segments. The first digit is a language group with 0 or 1 for English. The next grouping is the publisher ID, assigned by a central agency like R.R. Bowker in the US. This is followed by the book ID, assigned by the publisher. The final number is a checksum digit where all of the other digits are added in a certain way to enable a system to validate the rest of the number entered. The values for the checksum can be 0-9 or X: Large publishers need lots of book numbers so they have short publisher ID numbers. For example, very large publishers like Macmillan have two-digit publisher ID numbers. This leaves them 6 digits for the book ID. On the other hand, a local historical society might have a 7-digit publisher ID leaving only 1 digit for book IDs. The size of a publisher can be a factor in how well they sell a book. On average, larger publishers sell more copies of a book than smaller ones. Of course, in computer records, the dashes are stripped away and this info is lost.
Some book ID numbers leave off the leading digit, usually a zero. Hence, when manually entering some numbers it is sometimes necessary to add the 0 at the beginning. This is related to the original SBN numbers which didn't have the language group digit.
If a book was printed in the US between 1940 and 1980 and does not have an ISBN, it may have a Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN) that looks something like 68-3027 (see the bottom right of the card below):
The digits before the dash are typically a year in the 20th century related to the copyright date for that edition. On some books the year portion is a couple years after the copyright date. The rest of the number after the dash can be 1 to 6 digits and they are generally assigned sequentially as the Library of Congress makes cards for the books based on the copyright deposit copies received. Hence, with these numbers, it is generally possible to tell which of two books from the same copyright year were issued first and whether they were copyrighted together or with many weeks between.
When using the Library of Congress as a data source on LibraryThing, it is possible to look up books by LCCN. This is the second-best option after ISBN because it matches books around a number instead of words in the author and title fields.
Older books need a search by things like author surname, a keyword (or two) from the title, and a keyword from the publisher imprint. This helps to narrow down the selections. You will be presented with a list of matches and you can select the one that is closest to your own copy. Once selected you can "edit" the book to normalize the entry to your style, include tags and details you want, and select an existing or upload a new cover image.
Whenever possible I have tried to select the system image that most closely matches the book I have. Many books don't have images so I might have to find one online (eBay, Google image search, etc.) or make my own scan at 72 or 75 dpi:
We have a couple dozen major categories of books we collect so we have established "collections" in LibraryThing. Some of these we have not yet populated. There are also tags which can be added to any entry for phrases that are meaningful to the user.
When you enter a book, the system will tell you how many other copies are in the system. This is for the base title, not your particular edition. Still, with it you can find other users with similar cataloged collections. You can join groups of people who are interested in certain kinds of books. You can even add a widget to your web site to show covers of books in your collections.
Since I use an iPhone, I was interested to see how the site performed in its browser. The regular site works OK in Safari but it is not optimized for mobile browsing. It does not even detect the mobile browser. There is a separate LibraryThing URL for mobile browsing.
This is a stripped-down interface that allows quick searches by author, title, etc. so you can see if you have a book while in a store. I've already used this feature and it allowed me to buy with confidence that I would not be picking up a duplicate. Once I got home, I immediately entered the books before they were placed in our to-be-read area.
LibraryThing does not have an iPhone app for looking at books. They do have a recently-developed app for finding local bookstores, book events, etc. This is called Local Books (see image right).
LibraryThing is an interesting system. The first 200 books are free and if you want an unlimited number, you can pay an annual fee ($10) or a donation for lifetime membership ($25 suggested). This can be paid via PayPal. There are about a couple dozen things I'd change to improve the system but the bones are solid and it will continue to improve as time goes on. I've already sent my first batch of suggestions and am composing the next in hopes that the system will get better and better with the right ideas and people involved.
[Ed. note: for one person's take on the differences between LibraryThing and similar social cataloging sites such as Shelfari and GoodReads, click here.]
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