Organizing your books with Library Thing

With school being officially “out”, I’ve been working hard to organize our classroom and resources.  After searching high and low, I’ve settled on organizing our books using Library Thing.

Library Thing is extremely useful, as it allows me to categorize and tag books.  I’ve removed most of the default categories, so that the only ones left are my library and wishlist. 

I search for a book, either by title/author or by ISBN.  If it is there, then I click on the thumbnail on the side of the page, and it adds it to my collection.  If not, then I manually add the book, which is quite painless, other than filling in a few database fields.

I also like that you can review the book, add a rating, add comments, list when the books was read, from it was was acquired, o even to whom it was loaned.  Library Thing even links to paperbackswap and Amazon, if you want to purchase this book.

I’m also tagging a lot of my books.  Some will have only 1 tag, but most will have 2-3 tags.  I love the flexibility to display tagged books on a subject, which will help me plan out supplemental books for studies.  Likewise, most of my books are already sorted by subject; by looking at the tags, I will have a good idea of which box each books is located.  For instance this is a sampling of the ancient civilizations book collection that I have, in preparation for our upcoming study of ancient civilizations and history.

What I’m most excited about is that it is an online service.  While I am out shopping for used books at our favorite used bookstores or yard sales, I can check to see if I already own this book, or I can pull up specific books that I know I want to look for.  In particular, I am DYING for field guides, so categorizing the field guides that I own and/or adding the ones that I want to our wishlist prevents me from buying a book I don’t particularly need.

Wanna see our library (so far… I’ve only used it for 2 days!)?  Here’s the link!

The best news – it’s free for the first 200 books (which I used up on our history books and 1/10 of our animal books).  After that it’s $10/year or $25 for a lifetime membership, which is a steal of a price for an online service.

Do you use Library Thing?  Please let me know what other features that I haven’t discovered yet!