When I joined LibraryThing, I quickly became a crazy woman, trying to catalog every book in the house. They had a scanner for sale, but it was pretty expensive, so I did it by typing in ISBN numbers. I never did complete my collection, because my husband's collection is so large, and much of it is in boxes. For awhile after I joined, I had a very hard time weeding my personal collection, because I became obsessed with having the largest collection among my "friends" there. Now, I've got friends whose collections number in the thousands, so I've completely given up on that. I only have limited space, and don't relish the idea of my upstairs bookshelves crashing through the ceiling onto the main floor. Weeding is good!
What I love about LibraryThing is the ability to find people with similar interests; groups for people who also belong to Ravelry; Librarians who LibraryThing, Austenites, and so on. I like to read reviews by readers, and see who else has a book that I've got, or that I wish I had. I haven't really gotten involved with too many groups, because I'm more involved with the groups on Ravelry.
There are several other book oriented social sites out there; among them, Book Jetty, Books Well Read, Good Reads, and Shelfari. And of course there's WorldCat. I've been having fun with the I-Phone interface for WorldCat. I search for a title that I'm interested in, and because I've stored my zip code on my phone, it knows to look for the closest copy. I'm given the option of reserving the book from the two public libraries, the community colleges or various universities. When I choose which institution I'd like to borrow from, it opens a new window, for the catalog of the chosen institution, and I can reserve the book. I can do this from any coffee shop or rest stop on my travels, so anytime I feel the need to look up a book, with my trusty phone, I can do that. Worldcat lets you create lists, build bibliographies, and has a widget for a Facebook application. I will have to give that a try. I may try recreating my list of World War II fiction for children which I've been keeping since Library School, and see how that looks on Worldcat's Listmaker.
The last Library oriented program that I will mention is a piece of software that I have on my home computer, called Delicious Library. It lets me use the built-in camera on my computer to scan the barcode on books, cd's, dvd's, games, tools and electronics and searches out the information via the web, to put them into my library. I can tag and organize my stuff however I wish, and if I want to loan something out, simply drag the item to the appropriate entry in my address book, and it's checked out to that person. I could publish part or all of this catalog to my personal website, and if I did that, could access it from my iPhone as well. Delicious Library isn't as social, but it's more useful to me, because it functions as an inventory of all the hard to manage stuff I own. This is one of the coolest pieces of software I own, and I highly recommend it, but only if you have a Mac, as that's the only platform it works on.
There are so many ways to search for and organize your personal library, that there's hardly any time left over to actually read!
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