Week 48: Examine different online tools for cataloging your personal genealogy library and keeping track of the books you read. LibraryThing is a site where you can catalog and tag the books in your own personal library. It is a great tool for keeping track of the genealogy books you have. You can ever create tags for books you want to purchase. Good Reads and Shelfari are web sites that help you keep track of books you have read. All three of these sites have social networking components. Your challenge this week is to browse these sites and see how genealogists use them. Bloggers, do you use any of these tools? How do you organize your own personal genealogy library?
I have had a LibraryThing account for a few years. I homeschool, so we have enough books to fill a small town library, I kid you not. Reading this made me realize that I haven’t used my membership to its full potential. Now that I think about it, I haven’t updated my books since I started my membership – and I know that I have had a lot of books come in and out of my library since then. I also haven’t taken the time to tag and categorize the books, which is the whole point of using the site – so that I can easily find what I have. I will have to add this to my ever-growing list of things I need to do and I need to make sure to add a “genealogy” tag so that I can find all of those books when I’m looking for them. 🙂
I read though the GoodReads site and it is similar,but more geared towards book reviews and such. The books that you have on your virtual shelf don’t have to actually be on your shelf at home. It isn’t an organizational tool for your collection like LibraryThing is. It is more of a way to find good books that you would enjoy.
