Well, in a very sad cataloging frenzy I entered in my entire graphic novel/manga collection into LibraryThing. It was easier to start with this subset of my collection because I think my graphic novel to regular book ratio is about 1:3 or 1:4. There might be a stray volume here or there, but I think I picked up almost everything. The numbers of manga and graphic novels were about what I would have predicted - I’ve got 114 graphic novels, and 205 volumes of manga. My buying habits have really shifted over the past three years. I used to buy more graphic novels, but now it is fairly rare for me to purchase one. I probably buy a minimum of 5 volumes of manga a month now (but I never pay full retail price!!!).
Now I’m wondering about entering in the rest of my personal library. It might be a good weeding mechanism, if I force myself to think about how much I want to keep a book before adding it to LibraryThing.
Oh my…you shouldn’t have posted that link. I might spend the rest of my life there cataloging things…
They’ve got a nice basic template — but I wonder about some of the omissions. It would seem, for example, that publisher, edition, and printing information, as well as the ToC (the MARC 505 field), if any; bibliographic information (pagination, presence of illustrations, nature of illustrations, size); presence of index, presence and extent of bibliography; ISBN, etc. etc. would all have to be stuffed into the Comments field, which would make it terribly unwieldy for display purposes. (Am I sounding too much like a cataloguer?) And of course you’d have to remember your tags, there don’t appear to be “see” or “see also” possibilities, no practical way to build up a working thesaurus. Also no indication how it would handle diacritics or non-Roman characters.
I’d also love to know if the author has a deal with Amazon for a kick-back on every book ordered on a follow-through from the links in the catalogue … it’s what I would try to set up. Helps pay for the server!
Definitely an impressive bit of work, all in all. And I liked the “Made on a Mac, Built with BBEdit, Made with Lapsang Souchong” … Some day, I hope to construct a catalogue for my own books, using Mac, BBEdit, FileMaker Pro, and Laphroaig. LibraryThing will definitely be a role model I’d consult.
Tanuki