If I’m going to weed my collection, I have to keep track of what I’ve read some other way. Really, truly, or I’ll go mad.
Let me back up. I have a regular book talk I do on science fiction and fantasy from a reader’s perspective. I normally do it by updating my bibliography and using current trends as a jumping off point for themes. I update the bibliography from, you guessed it, looking at my bookshelves. Which won’t exist after the “grand culling of the books” that is about to be performed.
I really only want to do this once. I know I have north of 5,000 books to enter, and probably closer to 10,000. Not joking. We didn’t completely unpack this time, we never quite got to the end of the alphabet, mostly because we never got the last few shelves set up. We never quite found room for them.
But what’s an avowed biblioholic to do? There’s Goodreads, and there’s Library Thing and there’s Shelfari. I could use any one of them to track the great dismantling, but I want something that will keep track of everything, what I get rid of, what I read from now on, what I like, and what I didn’t. And, of course, all my TBRs. Does anyone have any recommendations for which one would be best? Not to mention why they think it’s best?
Can’t speak for anything but LibraryThing. I’m currently running a bibliography for a subject project on it. Upward of 800 titles (paid the small permanent fee) and growing. I like the ability to make it non-public yet still compare holdings to others, I also like the tagging I’ve been able to do with my own controlled vocabulary based on my project needs. And I also like the tag clouds and the searching/sorting ability I have with my tags.
I hear good things about “Library Thing” I’d like one for DVDs. Know of a one? Or can I massage one of these, seems they are too book oriented.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a good equivalent of LibraryThing for DVDs. A lot of LibraryThing users use a workaround of putting “- DVD” or so in the title of any DVDs they catalog.
You have many options, Library Thing, Shelfarri, and others, all that with a collection of your size would require a small fee. Have you considered buying an individual RefWorks account, or ProCite? or other similar software? If you did that then you could create your own fields for sorting, publicizing, etc. With your background, I bet you could rewrite some website to meet your needs, or how about some OA software that might be available for such a purpose? Good luck.
It looks like it’s going to be Library Thing. Not just because we already have an account, even though there’s nothing in it, but because of the tagging options. We need the multiplicity of tagging options really, really bad. Also, Library Thing has the option to push lists to GoodReads for the social networking aspects, which I’m interested in, but there don’t seem to be options for the reverse.
And we will be using the “-DVD” tag for DVDs, since we have collected more DVDs in the last year than books.
I’ve been a long time member of LibraryThing. It is great for cataloging books. As for DVDs and videos, I use Springpad to keep track of them.