Librarian at work, Librarian at home!

Librarything.com

WOW

Now you never have to leave your work.... even when there is nothing to think about connected to work once you close that library door - now you can be a librarian at home! Why one asks? Good question. Maybe somebody thought that librarians are inherently anal, and need to organize their books at home as they do at work. Maybe someone out there thinks that we librarians think in terms of categories and Dewey numbers at all times, organize our houses and lives by labeling things fiction (my 9 year olds' excuse for not doing her homework) non fiction (MOM!!! I peed my pants - the 3 year old) Fantasy : husband is coming home to cook me a 3 course dinner after which all kinds of romantic events will follow, etc. etc. The truth is, I am sure they are out there - the librarians who organize and straighten, and catalog their lives, but there are many people doing the same that are involved in firefighting, teaching, sales and other occupations. And then there are those of us librarians, whose desks are a dead give away that our lives are not as organized as our shelves....

so I jumped into librarything, teased by its promises of cataloging as easy as 'find and click', thinking I was in for an immediate reorg and relocation of all my books (and my kids', and my husbands', and those left behind by visitors!) NO such luck. The site allows you to catalog, and list your books, but that is about it. So now I can search my own list to see if I do or do not own a book, but they are not sorted or categorized. OK - so you can tag each book, that would certainly make a search easier. Let's remember: we're talking about unorganized people trying to organize such an amorphous growing changing and always out of control thing as their book collection! These people will NEVER remember what tags they used for what kind of book. Was it local eating? adventure or travel? animals or pets? Magic or fantasy?

Maybe someone could design a website that allows us un-organized poor souls to list the many tags we use for all our books, photos, video's, and others.....

Here is what I do like about librarything:

you can compare your bookcase to someone else's. This allows you to find people with similar tastes and look on their bookshelf for titles you have not yet perused... It is like taking a sneak peak into someones living room - exciting and somewhat clandestine...

You can try to have your book group members join - if it is not too personal (there is that living room thing) I know that within my own book group there are very different tastes. The members of my book group have gotten me to read things that I would never have picked up by myself. Because I trust them I think it would be cool to scan the shelves of my book group friends and pick a book that way. Hey - if I really don't like it - they will never know and I will never tell!

(Might give you some secret insight into peoples lives, thoughts, and fantasies too!)