Friday, January 01, 2010

Cataloging fun

Happy new year and all that shit...

A new year is often a catalyst for people to 'start fresh', a 'clean slate', etc. and certainly I've had times when the new year has seen me brimming with plans for WHAT-I-WILL-ACCOMPLISH in the coming year. Luckily this time, I am gainfully not-employed (aka. on maternity leave) so I don't have a burning desire to turf my old 'to do' list system and invent a new and better one that will guarantee my life will be ORGANISED. (Also because I am now 'happily married' to the GTD methodology and use Remember The Milk for all my 'To Do list' needs.)

No, this year, I am merely shifting my online book/reading list from All Consuming [AC] to LibraryThing. Why? Well, I have really liked using AC for the past few years (not sure when I started, but my first entry is on May 2003, but it is possible to add things retrospectively, so it may not be my actual start date). However, AC is buggy and it annoys me that it frequently can't locate a book I have read (since it sources its data from the Amazon database, which is US-centric). It also lacks a lot of functionality that other online bibliographic tools offer.

I did a fairly extensive review of as many online book cataloguing services as I could find:
Shelfari has a nice look to it, and almost emulates the simplicity of AC (which is something I really like about AC), but I ended up choosing LT, mainly because it seems to have the highest number of visitors (up around the 1 million mark towards the end of 2009, compared to AC which had just under 20,000 in Feb 2009). Hopefully, this will ensure its longevity as well as giving me access to a bigger database of books and all the other functional benefits that come with this.

So, new year, clean slate, and all that... I am, as of now, using LT. One day, maybe, I will get my data from AC and transfer it to LT, but it is quite a backlog, so will get around to it if I do.
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