That's right. No books. How embarrassing. And I call myself a librarian (occasionally, though I secretly prefer the term information ninja). So this Thing is the perfect opportunity to find out how I could actually be using this tool, instead of logging in once two months ago and then never returning.
So here is my newly edited profile - much better! Now to add some books. I grabbed a handful off the shelf, and was pleased at how simple it was to add them when all you have to do is type an ISBN. I came slightly unstuck when my M.C. Beaton books weren't on Amazon (which is odd, because that's where I bought them), but they were found using Overcat instead, so that was okay. I then tested it with a book of madrigals published in 1905, and a heraldry book from 1886. No problem finding either of those, which was great.
It's a bit hard to see how my library might use it. I suppose it might be a quick and easy way of adding recent acquisitions to a website (certainly easier than running the report query, and turning the resultant data into something readable), but if you can only add 200 books then it would last about a month. Unless it works differently for libraries than it does for personal users? Would you have to delete previously added books (eg last month's acquisitions list) to make room for new ones? That seems shortsighted to me. Maybe I'm missing the point. But when your library has in excess of 300,000 books, LibraryThing looks like small fry.
I think before I dismiss this site as "nice, but not really useful for me" (barring the obvious exception of the booksearching fora mentioned in my earlier post), I will create a profile for a society I'm a member of. It has a small collection of books - small enough that everything will fit without having to pay. Once I've done this, I might be able to use it in imaginative ways. So - the jury's still out on LibraryThing.
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