I've been wrestling with a dilemma only a book geek could understand: How to best use LibraryThing, a cool web site lets you catalog your books. (Catalog is library-speak for "make a list of and categorize.") They're responsible for the little books display on the right-hand side of my blog.
At first I thought I would enter only the books I physically have in my home -- logical, eh? The wrench in the works is LibraryThing recommends other books you might like based on your collection, and I've been getting recommendations for books I've already read (I just don't own a copy right now.) This seems to defeat the purpose of a very cool aspect of LibraryThing.
Since it's a virtual catalog, why not use it to catalog every book I've ever read? Then I could just tag them with "Owned" or "Unowned" or whatever. (Tags are little subject headings LibraryThing and some blogs use to group information by subject.)
My other issue is that I've been buying a lot more books than I'm able to read lately. For instance, I bought 21 (!) books at a charity book sale at work this year. And I have seven unread books from the 2005 book sale. I could catalog these in LibraryThing with the tag "Unread."
Have I mentioned lately that I love tags? And now that I've upgraded to the new Blogger, I can start tagging my blog, as you'll see at the bottom of this post. (Blogger calls them labels for some reason.) Meanwhile, check out my gorgeous tag cloud from LibraryThing here. I belong to the I heart metadata discussion group, which betakate founded with the description, " Let's get together, you and me, baby, and develop a folksonomy. And we'll float away on a tag cloud of love."
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