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December 10, 2005

Now you'll find out how nerdy I REALLY am

I have discovered heaven. True, pure heaven.

One of my crazy fears -- I know I have many, but this is a big one -- is that of fire destroying my house and causing me to loose my collections. The problem is, I don't collect things like figurines, I collect (hoarde, actually) information and memories. Over the last year or so, I've found myself trying to get ALL the crap I never want to lose onto the computer (and backed up on DVDs or online, of course) so that if I can only grab one thing on my way out the door, it's the computer. I probably didn't mention that that's why I scanned every photo I own in the entry I wrote about doing that, but that's why.

Anyway, besides my music, my papers from college, my old website designs, and my photos, the only other collection I've ever cared much about is my books. Some of them would be irreplaceable if destroyed because they contain messages from old babysitters or because they're old editions from my childhood. Mainly, though, I worry that I'll never be able to recreate my book collection because I won't know which books I had.

Earlier this year, I spent a lot of time searching for a service where I could record my library. I found software that would do that, but most of them were a lot more complex than I was looking for, as well as too expensive, and not very conducive to saving the list if the hard drive died. In the end, I set to work creating an Excel spreadsheet (see previous entry for more on my love of spreadsheets), but it was very time consuming because, for some reason, I felt compelled to enter in the names of the publishers, the copyright date, and every identifying detail that could ever be necessary in, for instance, a works cited list. It got to be too much very quickly and I stopped before I even hit 20 books. So I gave up. I tried to put it out of my mind and instead focused on worrying about cataloguing our DVD collection, which is pretty stupid since there's only one movie I really care about replacing. But I managed to let the book thing go. Sort of.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday when I was looking at some blogs belonging to lesbian parents, I noticed an item on one blog's sidebar that said, "Random books from _______'s library. Powered by Library Thing."

I almost died, I swear. My breathing stopped and I thought I was going to implode.

I'm not kidding, I couldn't handle the excitement. I had to bookmark the Library Thing website and set it aside until my poor little heart could take it. Tonight, when Lauren spent a few hours in the lounge at a building program, I began The Project to End All Projects. I entered in our entire library.

And here it is.

Now, to be fair, I didn't realize until way too late that you could enter in the ISBN and get the EXACT book, if it was available. So a lot of those are incorrect editions or printings. Also, somewhere around 10 books couldn't be found at all, and I was stupid enough to not pay attention to which ones those were. At some point I'll have to go back and put those in manually. Some of them are missing data about authors, too, so that needs fixing. And I'm sure there are a few books scattered around the apartment that I've missed. But in the end, what counts is that OUR LIBRARY IS PRESERVED FOR ALL ETERNITY!

And with tags. Oh my goodness how I love tags. Tags are the best thing ever invented on the web.

My library is online. With tags. And my amazon.com wishlist has been all organized in categories (not as good as tags, but good). I'm so worked up that I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight.

Posted to Books at December 10, 2005 03:21 AM

Comments

Posted by: Samm at December 10, 2005 10:07 AM

Posted by: Rebecca at December 10, 2005 12:12 PM

Posted by: Denise at December 10, 2005 12:43 PM

Posted by: Kristy (heymiddleground from LJ) at December 12, 2005 08:28 PM