Your library at LT

when you just found LT, did you try to add all of your books in your library at LT or just added new ones you were reading and bought later?

I added them all.

The reason I joined LT was to have a place to catalogue my books. There wouldn't have been any point to simply adding books acquired after I joined. (I never add books I've read but do not own; again, that would defeat the purpose of my LT library.)

I added them all. It probably took a few weeks all together; and now I add them as I buy them.

I added a few representative ones while I explored a bit. Once I was addicted (not much longer thereafter, I paid up, and added them all. Now I add them as I buy them - or read them for the few ebooks I've added.

My library consists of all the books I have read (and remember) lol... own, borrow or other - Now I add the books as I read them

I added the new books I bought, and the old books that I read. I had/have an Access data base and was daunted at the thought of adding all my books.

I started adding my old books about a year after being on LT. I think it was once I started to use talk that it became hard. When I knew I had a book we were discussing, but it wasn't in my LT library, no touchstones - etc.

Also once I went over 200 and had to buy a membership there was no real reason not to add them.

I was preparing to move house when I joined the site, so I added all the books I owned. I also included wishlisted books and anything I could recall reading.

It wasn't long before I hit 200 though, and it's not really worth it for me to pay for membership when there are free sites I can use for cataloging, so I trimmed my library down to books and a few others that represent my tastes. I keep buying/mooching new books though, so I might have to trim it further, to books I've read only.

I use LT for both (owned and read). I cataloged all (or nearly all) books I owned, but economic times are lean and I can't afford to buy as many books as I like, so these days, I'm doing most of my reading via libraries. So I continue to use LT to catalog any books I purchase, but I also enter the books I read from the library. (I use the Comments or other fields to let me know if something is library vs. owned, or etc.)

The beauty of LibraryThing is that it adapts well to different usage levels and different needs. :)

I originally joined to keep track of books I wanted to read: my TBR tagged pile. Pieces of paper, sticky notes everywhere, my leaky memory and spreadsheet helped. LT was a blessing when I ran across it.

I've since started adding everything I've read. Well, what I can remember reading anyway. I haven't added everthing. Once I remember where I put that piece of paper, I'll add those too.

It took me 8 months (Oct 07 to Jun 08) to add my books. I had to fit that in around working full time and being a wife and mother.

After entering about 10 books, I paid for a lifetime membership.

I've kept it up - I always add new books within a day of getting them. Plus, I move stuff around occasionally and since I have location tags, have to keep those up too.

I only put in the books I own and are on my shelves. But I know a lot of people use LT for library books, wishlist books, and books read but not owned. To each their own.

I stormed through the first 1600 to 1800 then became reluctant to dig up the piles in the next room to do; so I have a few thousand to go. I do, however, enter every book that I get within a day or two, usually right away. Someday I hope to finish it.

Robert

It took me about a year to enter mine, but that wasn't non-stop. I only enter the books I actually own.

I used the auto import feature, and did it a letter at a time (author's Last Name). But then I had to print out the letter from my DB with book publication data and go through each book on LT to make sure they were all added. Of course they didn't. I had many without ISBNs and some where they were entered with a lower case -x, and LT would only take -X.

It took a while, I had internet problems, and then I had printer problems.

I'm sticking with the free membership/small representative sample for now. The idea of finding out how many books I own fills me with dread.

Dread? Why?

14 > she might not have as many as she thought!

Or she may find out that she read them all and needs to buy more.

Or she may find her tbr pile is larger then she expected.

I decided just to post what I'd read a year ago and work my way up from there. It gives people an idea what my current tastes are. I have gotten rid of some of the books of a year ago on Bookins. I note that in the tags. But at some point I have owned all my books.

I rarely use my library because it never has what I am interested in reading. If I'm going to do interlibrary loan I'd just as soon have it come from Amazon or Bookins or buy it. I like to be in control of my reading and I like to be able to go back to look things up if I have forgotten plot wise in a book.
I love the book review feature of LT.

18> I got the impression you enjoy Cornwell. ;)

Oh, ya. For sure I like Cornwell, but I still have plenty of room in my schedule for historical fiction and whatever grabs my fancy.

I had such fantastic fun entering all my books, I keep buying more! ;-) I enter everything I've read; I don't have to own it. If I don't enter it, there's a chance I might buy it again. You never know, the way they change the cover design for new editions can easily fool you if you read a book long enough ago. I can easily find the books that are actually owned by me by using my tags. I tag all books I don't own as "unowned"; books which I did own but got rid of are also tagged as "rehomed". Additional tags tell me if I borrowed a book from the library or someone else.

LibraryThing has made me feel more able to get rid of some books - for instance, to use a recent example, I enjoy the occasional Cornwell (Patricia not Bernard), but I don't ever re-read them. So I am trying to be ruthless & get rid of the books I know I won't re-read. If they're listed on LT, I can be sure, if I spot a Cornwell in a charity shop, not to buy one I've read before. The covers are, you must admit, very similar.

The only recent book duplication which occurred recently was when I let my other half wander off in Waterstones on his own. He's now under strict instruction that, should he wander off, he wanders back again for me to vet his stuff before purchase.

I am moving house in a couple of years and have found that this is a very good exercise in deciding what to take and what to 'release' through 'BookCrossing.

I think that I have catalogued all the books I am taking except ... the complete works of Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Conan Doyle, Thackeray, R L Stevenson, Jane Austen etc, all in matching leather, which I accquired from my grandparents.

I am leaving that for a rainy day because none have ISBNs and all will have to be entered by hand. A formidable task!

You could always take the easy way out and classify the Complete Works as a single item, like this: http://www.librarything.com/work/191351

I enter in only the books I (and my husband) actually own, whether or not I've read them. I'm still trying to decide how I should classify non-fiction as read or not read; it makes sense when dealing with biographies, books on history, etc., but less sense when dealing with cookbooks and travel guides.

There are many, many books I've read which I no longer have a copy of (very sadly!). But to me, my library is the books that I physically own. Note that I might have a different view if I used the actual library!

#24 poplin - I had the same problem when I started classifying non-fiction that I wouldn't read, like atlases or dictionaries. I called them reference instead of non-fiction.

Also, instead of read or not read (my tags are read and tbr), I made a tag called ntbr - not to be read.

So in my library I've got fiction, nonfiction, or reference and

read, tbr, ntbr, or started.

#23 Thorold, I did wonder about doing that. When I registered my History of the English Speaking Peoples I noticed that one of the cover pictures was for all four volumes.

I'm still adding the books that I own. Currently LT has all my books that are shelved. The books that aren't in LT are sitting on the dining room table - waiting to be catalogued on LT and shelved. I have also catalogued books that have passed through my hands since I joined LT (will have the "dno" tag if I don't own it and other tags that indicate my relationship to it). I have not yet (with one exception - can you find it?) catalogued the books I read before joining LT that I don't own.

>26 pinkozcat:

You'll find that there are endless debates about this issue - to simplify, and at the risk of being shot down: if you catalogue the whole thing as a single work, you'll only see connections with other people who have the complete work, not those who only have individual parts of it. For your Churchill, that makes sense, because most people will have the whole thing anyway. For Dickens, there will be lots of people who don't have the Complete Works but do have David Copperfield or Pickwick Papers or whatever - it might well be interesting for you to see your connections with those people. On the other hand, I catalogued my complete Thackeray as individual volumes, and found that it threw up very few connections apart from the main novels, because other editions stick the shorter works together in different combinations.

thorold - you are right. I'll enter them separately, however long it takes. It is not as though getting them all in is a life and death matter.

Hopefully LT will not confuse my two copies of The Just So Stories. I have nine different editions of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and it had a real problem with that - it kept on turning up the wrong copy or telling me that I had two or three copies of the same edition. Between us we sorted it all out in the end, though ...

29 Hopefully LT will not confuse my two copies of The Just So Stories.

If you have 2 copies of The Just So Stories then you should see your 2 copies in your library (your book level data) but they should both take you to the same page (work level data) where all of the copies of The Just So Stories (regardless of edition) should be combined.

I have nine different editions of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and it had a real problem with that - it kept on turning up the wrong copy or telling me that I had two or three copies of the same edition.

The "work" concept on LT brings together ALL of the editions of the same work. LT does not maintain "edition" level data at this point. So I suspect that LT was telling you that you own 2 or 3 copies of the same work (not edition) and was correctly combining several of your Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam editions as being the same "work." (And eventually some combiner will come along and put them together again - no one can change your "book level" information but the "works" information is a community effort.)

For more information regarding the LT "works" concept see the green sidebar on every "Combine Potentials" page. Or you can read more here:
http://www.librarything.com/concepts.php#works

>28 thorold:

When I have a work that contains multiple other works I enter the omnibus edition (tagged "omnibus") AND each of its constituent works (tagged "inclusion") - that way I see all the connections each way. (See my profile for Works of Works tagging structure.)

#30 PortiaLong - all my copies of The Rubaiyat are different - most are old with no ISBN, some are in different languages, all have different covers and some are different versions (there were five versions of the Fitzgerald quatrains - he kept on editing and upgrading). Some are illustrated and some are not. LT tried to merge some copies but we sorted it out in the end.

I collect different versions ; it started by accident but now it has become a hobby.

I'm not saying that they aren't different - of course they are! I'm just saying that a number of them would qualify as the same "work" by LT's definition.

"no ISBN" - many books on LT have no ISBN (er, all of them published before 1967 and some from later years as well), this doesn't mean that they are not the same work.

"different covers" - ditto, doesn't affect the work status, most editions of books have different covers, it's what is between the covers that counts.

"different languages" - From the green sidebar:

Foreign editions. The Italian and English-language editions of a book are the same work.

The exception is for "dead languages" - Greek, Latin, etc. - this is usually referred to as the "dead language exception"

"some are illustrated and some are not" - Again from the green sidebar:

Editions. The Dover and Signet editions of Alice in Wonderland are the same work. Ditto normal and "deluxe illustrated editions."

For the different versions of the Fitzgerald quatrains - editing/upgrading etc. - you could make the argument that they were different works based on the amount of "new" material contained. These are often debated in the Combiners! group:
http://www.librarything.com/groups/combiners

An example - different editions of textbooks: one new chapter - NOT a different work, new editor with 20% new material presented in a different format - different work. In general, adding an introduction or a few footnotes or a critical essay at the end doesn't get it separated out as a different work if 90% of the contents are the same. Adding a 4th novel to an omnibus previously containing 3 novels would end up as a different work.

*grin* I have no problem with having two copies of the same work - the problem which I had was that I'd enter nine books and find that LT thought that I only had five - not two copies of the same book but just one book. There may have been a gremlin in the works that day - there have been a lot of gremlins around in the last few weeks.

>34 pinkozcat: I'd enter nine books and find that LT thought that I only had five - not two copies of the same book but just one book.

Now THAT is just plain WRONG! You should certainly be able to see (in your library) every single book that you have entered. If they have been combined (accidentally or on purpose) you should see a separate entry for each book when you look at the "work" page. I would definately blame gremlins (...or my cat - it's evil that way, a right bastard as a matter of fact - feel free to blame my cat...)

I've not seen that in my own library but I would definately scream bloody-murder if LT didn't acknowledge each and every volume that I entered.

ROFL - Don't talk to me about cats!!! I was woken yesterday morning at 4.05am by one of my cats sicking up on my persian rug. I turfed her outside and she neatly barfed on my rubber thongs which I keep on the veranda.

I'll blame her - I'm certainly in the mood to blame her for everything which goes wrong at the moment.

All my books are there with their own cover pictures - as I said, LT and I eventually sorted it out. I think that scanning in the covers made a difference.