Library Thing is proving to be a wonderful distraction from freshman comp essays and administrative paperwork. The site, active since late August, uses a simple interface: type in some identifying details about your book--e.g., an ISBN, author's name, or part of the title--and a tag, and lo! the LOC or Amazon catalogs fill in the rest. Click on the appropriate link, and you now have an entry in your very own library catalog. If necessary, you can enter all the information by hand. Moreover, you can generate a printable version of your catalog, search other users' libraries, and link to external URLs.

It's a nifty idea. Right now, there are still some glitches: it only"recognizes" editions in LOC or Amazon, which means that the 2000 first ed. of a book only available in a 2005 printing may be nowhere to be seen; the site currently leans towards US editions, although you can access Amazon's international catalogs (this will change once Tim, the site owner, incorporates the British Library catalog); and, as other users have noted in my own comments section, multivolume editions get inconsistent treatment. Nevertheless, the site is already well worth using.

[X-posted from The Valve.]

Caleb McDaniel - 9/18/2005

This does sound nifty, although it will be even niftier if they make it possible to export the data to note-taking software or (even better) make it able to export bibliographic information directly into footnotes in word-processing programs.