I’ve been meaning to try LibraryThing for ages — it’s one of those things you are always seeing enthusiastic comments about, and in my case I’ve noted it for future reference more than once (Andrew Brown was already plugging it in his Guardian column in September 2005, for instance).
The main reason I held back was that I already have a perfectly good standalone library catalogue application (BookCat), with more than 2000 books painstakingly added to my database over the course of several years. I didn’t fancy the slog of typing all those details in again, even if the social aspects of LibraryThing look like fun — how else could you find out how many people who own Lord Berners’ memoirs also own Mandl on Statistical Physics?
Fortunately, it turns out that you can import data to LibraryThing in bulk, provided you’ve got ISBN numbers. I dumped all my BookCat data into a CSV file, created a LibraryThing account, uploaded the file, and left it to churn away. LibraryThing managed to find bibliographic data for all but a handful of the 1600 books in my list that have ISBN numbers without more than a little bit of tidying up. Very quick and easy.
There seems to be some delay in transferring the data to the public server, so the link to my library that I’ve added to this page may not give you anything very interesting to look at if you’re not already a LibraryThing user, but I’m sure it will be working soon.
Bear in mind that it isn’t very representative of my books–at least one third of my library is too old to have ISBNs, and I’ll wait and see how useful and interesting I find LibraryThing before I start retyping or copying and pasting details for the missing 600 books! So for the moment what I have uploaded is very much skewed towards recent publications.