Marie, the Boston Bibliophile, asks today’s question: Cataloging sources. What cataloging sources do you use most? Any particular reason? Any idiosyncratic choices, or foreign sources, or sources you like better than others? Are you able to find most things through LT’s almost 700 sources?
You know the saying “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”? Well, all Amazon and no other cataloging sources makes Dawn a dull girl! I checked my LT Library Stats – I currently have 271 books cataloged, all using Amazon as the catalog source! I think LT defaults to Amazon, and that’s what I’ve stuck with. If I had a more varied/specialty library, perhaps I’d be inclined to look at the other sources.
I catalog using ISBN, not Library of Congress card numbers. I had some books without ISBNs, but was able to find them by using the title/author combination. This was an acceptable “work around” to me, even if the cover art doesn’t match the volume in my library.
Back to that “dull girl” thing … I was feeling “ivy league” and added Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth and Penn to my catalog source list; I’ll search in one of those for my next few additions!
Lol I used all amazon too! I have 1118 Amazon, and one manual entry. I figured since the default was working so well, there was no need to try the others.
kegsoccer – I’ll report back in a couple weeks and let you all know how my new method is working. I tried *Tan Lines* by J. J. Salem, the novel I’m reading now … no luck at the 3 universities I added or the Library of Congress. I found it at amazon and the “Boston Metro Library Network”. I’ll probably end up going back to amazon as default, but I’ll experiment for a while!
Here in New Zealand, we get books from all over, with a lot of British editions coming in – and, of course, I have a lot of New Zealand books. So my LT cataloguing breakdown currently stands at:
132 amazon.co.uk
106 amazon.com
97 National Library of New Zealand
12 University of Otago (NZ)
11 manual entry
7 National Library of Australia
6 Library of Congress
5 British Library (powered by Talis)
4 University of Auckland (NZ)
4 National Library of Scotland
1 Canadian National Catalogue
Still a fairly small subset of the over 600 cataloguing sources LibraryThing has!
Regards
Tim
Tim – I’m impressed with the variety in your cataloging sources! I’ve reverted back to my default of amazon! I tried to enter a photo book of the Netherlands that my husband just brought back from a trip … I tried half a dozen source options, thinking one of the European-based sources would have it, no luck