Lifetime membership to LibraryThing!

redbyrd_sgfic rocks. Not only is she a great author (and you should all check out her SG-1 fanfic), she just gave me a cool prezzie!

A while back I posted about this really cool website called LibraryThing. (Well, it's cool for bibliophiles and bookivores. Not so much for non-geeks.) It's an online catalog for your own personal library, and all you have to do is tell it the ISBN or LoC for each book! The first 200 books are free, after that it's either $10 a year for unlimited books or $25 for an unlimited lifetime membership. While this is undoubtedly a very cool website, I undoubtedly have more than 200 books, and no money to spend on something as frivolous as a book catalog (grad school, y'know).

redbyrd_sgfic understands just how deeply cool LibraryThing is, because she and her significant other have a much larger library than mine. (I am green with envy. Also over the fact that her library is, you know, all in one spot and not on two sides of the continent, with the majority on the other side from where I spend most of my time.) As a thank-you for passing the link along, she gave me a lifetime membership! Woo-hoo! Now I just have to drag the box of books I have here that I didn't catalog down from the storage area, and plot how to get the friend who turned me onto LibraryThing to let me borrow his Cat (barcode scanner) over Christmas so I can use it on the books I've got at home. (Because two bookcases full, plus odds and ends, is a lot to catalog. Even if all you have to do is type in the ISBNs.)

Speaking of cool things, the woman who is co-directing the seminary Children's Choir with me mentioned that she happens to have a lot of old hymnals sitting around that she's trying to get rid of. Well, gee, it so happens I collect old hymnals. Particularly if she's got multiple copies of them--I like four hymnals per copy, when possible, so that if necessary I can get a four-part harmony going. See, for me, sitting around a piano singing hymns in four-part harmony is a form of recreation. And you want a wide variety of stuff to sing, right? And a choice of harmonizations, because sometimes newer books have none (ELW, I'm looking at you) or really screwy ones (don't think I don't see you, LBW).

Got the hymnals!

So I picked up the hymnals today, and promptly tried to add them to LibraryThing. Problem: they're too old to have an LoC or ISBN printed in them. And they're titled "The Hymnal," and doing a keyword search on something that generic just didn't sing to me, particularly since LibraryThing apparently doesn't allow Boolean searches (i.e. searches using AND, OR, or NOT). (I have better things to do than wade through pages and pages of hymnals looking for a specific one.) Aha! Inspiration strikes. Toddle on over to the Library of Congress online catalog, which does allow for Boolean searching. Hymnal AND Brethren. Ten seconds gets me the LoC number, copy/paste to LibraryThing and it's done. About ten seconds longer than scanning a barcode, but still easy as pie.