Librarything.com - A Godsend of a Site that can only Get Better

A few months back I was looking for a way to catalogue all my books here. After searching around for some programmes that could help me do the job, I came across http://www.librarything.com . What a great site! … While there’s still a lot of deevlopment to be done, the basic framework is up and running well, and was just what the doctor ordered when it comes to cataloguing my books. You can enter books by ISBN – though I’ve found that a lot of Asian ISBN’s won’t be found. In those cases, the books have to be manually entered.

Some of the other functions that the site provides are great. Some you would expect – e.g. – showing who else shares your books (if you’ve made them public), statistics on all the fields that are relevant to the books – i.e. year of publication, authors, genre etc. One thing that really caught my attention was the ‘TAG CLOUD’. What it does, is present a visual representation of all the keywords that you’ve included for your books. The more there are with that keyword, the larger the word is. It’s scary in a way – I’m only about a quarter of the way through entering all my books, but already the tag cloud gives a pretty good explanation of ‘ME’. The follwoing is the cloud that it’s generated so far for me based on the keywords I’ve entered for my books:
(After having posted this once, I realise that the stylesheet from my blogster blog overrides the whole ‘effect’ with the different sized fonts for the following list of words. To see the original tag cloud, click here – http://www.librarything.com/tagcloud.php?view=stujay )

.NET?????arabicAsiaaustraliaautoaviationbahasaBahasa IndonesiaBalinesebeijingbengalibiblebiographyblilingualismBuddhismburmaburmesebusinessC languageC#cambodiacantonesecarcentral asiachiangmaichildrenchinachinesechristianCIAcoachingcodecomputerComputersconspiracyCross Culturecsscultureda vincidale carnegiedanishDialectdialectsdictionarydietdutchelectronicsenglishespionagefacilitationfictionfilipinoFOfrenchgermangrammar[greek](http://www.libraryth
ing.com/catalog.php?view=stujay&tag=greek)Hackinghealthhebrewhindihinduhong kongHumourhypnosisindiaindonesiaInternetIslamITitalianjapanesejavajavanesejazzKhmerknow authorkoreakoreanlanguagelaolaoslatin dictionaryLawleadershipLearninglinguisticslinguistics chinese englishlinguistics， cantoneseLiteraturemalayMalaysiamanualmathMathematicsmicrosoftmindMongolianmotivationmotivationalmusicnegotiationnepalinetworkingnew agenorwegianpakistanpersianpersonal improvementPhilippinesphillipinesphillipinopoliticsportugesePressprogrammingpsychologypublishingregionalreligionreligiousrussiarussiansanskritscandinaviaSE Asiaself helpself improvementsemanticsshanghaiShanghaineseshorthandSingaporesociologyspanishspiritualswedishtagalogTalengTamilteachingthaithailandthaiไทยtrainingtravelTriviaurduUSAvietnamvietnamesewarwomenXSLไทย中文广东日本语한글

… Pretty neat huh? When all the books get entered I’ll post an updated tag-cloud up – it will be interesting to see how much it changes.
Anyway, if you’d like to check my books out, take a look at http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=stujay – (I’ve also included a link to it on the side of this blog)

I would recommend this site to anyone that owns any books. Within the first day of entering my books I found a number of really interesting people out there that had the same titles that I did – some that didn’t think that there would be anyone out there who had them.

This blog entry was brought to you by Librarything.com