Back from the book store. Surprisingly, this LibraryThing thing is not actually all that helpful when it comes to restraining my book-buying impulses.

Heh. Me neither--I found one book I had on my shelf, and just ordered five more in the series from Amazon.com (sadly, all used, from different sellers, so I'll probably get them last to first...but how much do I love that I can DO that now, rather than haunting used bookstores for ages, hoping to run into them...)

Yeah, I think noticing that you can grab the Amazon link for individual books when browsing people's libraries might just have been a mistake.

But it is amazing, isn't it? I remember the days of stumbling across a book and loving it and finding it was part of a series and despairing of ever finding the rest. Or finding a new author and crossing your fingers that the library might have one or two of their back catalog.

I love me some modern world, I tell you what.

Someone please tell me not to start editing my individual entries and editing them to MARC standard.

Connie, we share a brain.

Connie, we share a brain

I'm itching to correct capitalization. Fortunately, there's no real place to put 440 tags.

That's exactly what I've spent the last half hour doing. It's giving me a headache. I have to stop.

What is Marc standard? Or is it better that I not know?

573 books (579, but I've got a few doubles [EDIT: whoops, found a few more. Make that 575. And I think I have a couple in the car...]). It doesn't SEEM like it's that big a number, really...and knowing that only maybe half to two-thirds of those are books I really like....huh. Perversely, that makes me feel MORE willing to go buy books.

See, I think I was unduly influenced as an impressionable pre-teen. One of my friends had me over to her house, and her stepdad had a library room. Which was shelves on three sides of a room (probably 8 by 8). Floor to ceiling. Basically filled with *exactly* the sort of books I enjoyed reading (scifi and fantasy). I was SO JEALOUS. Becuase of course, he wasn't about to lend his books to some random 12 year old friend of his stepdaughter's. But SHE *lived there*. She could read them any time she wanted! So jealous.

Someday, someday I will have that library...

Marc is the coding that catalogers to make their catalog records readable in different computer library catalogs.

[link]

re: MARC standard.

I spent ten of my happiest working years doing retrospective conversion for a company that converts physical card catalogs to computerized catalogs.

There are conventions for punctuation and capitalization and order of information, and I still make notations of books using those conventions. Not the most generally useful skill.

I can read catalogue cards in nearly all the European languages and Latin, used to be able to transliterate Cyrillic and Greek on the fly, and take a fairly confident stab at converting old Miss Grundy's personalized cataloging system into standard. I was the resident expert on Catholicism and medieval/Renaissance history and more than once had to tell people that Pope, Christopher was more than likely referring to the writer, not a resident of the Papal throne.

Yeah, I miss it.