Last January when I atteneded the OLA SuperConference I found alot of people talking about LibraryThing. This is a website which allows you to list your books and then to share information about them with the public. You can tag the books and write reviews and there are discussion groups for people with different interests. This is like crack for librarians.

 When I got home I looked at LibraryThing and after a couple of weeks joined. Since then I have put my entire library on it. You can see a widget on the right side of this page showing covers from the catalog of my books. I even went so far as to purchase an old "cueCat" scanner so I could get the information into LIbraryThing more easily.

 This is all quite cool and I was very happy last night when I finished the job and had all 755 of the books in my personal librarything catalogue. But as a Librarian I still craved more control, greater access and standardization of my collection.

Using the Lex Systems product Lexfile I have a stand alone catalog and circulation system but no MARC records for the system. MARC records are the library standard for use in library catalogs. I have the ISBNs for 93% of the books in my library thanks to the work I did on LibraryThing. From Library of Congress catalog I can use those ISBN's to find and download MARC records for free but I also need a batch search and retrieve software which will get the records I need.

I couldn't find this last piece until yesterday. MARCedit is a free piece of software which has a bunch of tool in it to assist with catloguing including a batch search and retrieve function with the z39.50 protocol. I was working with this last night and retrieved 221 Marc records for my library.

 I have not completely mastered the downloading via z39.50. Server settings can change on a regular basis and so it is difficult to keep the 300 odd z39.50 sites included in MARCedit up to date. I am hoping that I will be able to properly access the Library of Congress OPAC this evening in which case I expect I will get the majority of my work in this stage finished.

 After this I ill have to develop a classification and location system to show where the books are and I will have to make some decisions about barcodes. I guess there will also be issues with item types but I will worry about that later. If I can get standardized records with a good bibliographic description I will be very happy.

 Or else I could go out and socialize with people abit. Maybe make some friends...

UpDate April 9- I did some work on this on the weekend and got around 350 records downloaded from various sources. However, what I hadn't counted on was getting duplicated which my CAT couldn't get rid of. The upshot of this is that I need to get a simple database installed on my conputer so I can run a couple of SQL queries after each download to remove found ISBNs from the search list. As it is I am stil terrifically pleased with the way this is working out.