This is just too damn cool. LibraryThing is an online cataloguing system that lets you publish the contents of your library. And it comes just in time: my books here only fill four pineapple boxes (those low-sided ones — no volume but easy on the back for moving), but now that I’m here for another four years –and once the salary starts rolling– that is going to change awfully quickly. I catalogued everything within reaching distance, you can check it out at tikitu’s library catalogue. Um, that is, everything in reaching distance in English. I sense a deficiency looming, once my Dutch really gets up to scratch.

This is a pretty recent system, but it seems to be getting popular fast (at least, the owner feels the need to move to better servers). The interface is very simple but with some lovely elegant features (check out the options for editing the display style). It’s unfortunately pretty buggy at the moment, but I hope this gets ironed out — as I said, this is new tech. (Thanks, by the way, to the Little Professor for the headsup.)

I anticipate one major use for this system: at least, I’ll be able to keep track of who I’ve loaned books to and who I’ve borrowed from. I do write this stuff down, in little notebooks that get lost or rained on or that I just forget to look inside for months on end or (in extreme cases) that I loan to friends. As part of my ongoing plan to upload my consciousness to the internet, this service will be invaluable. Thank you, Tim Spalding.

Update: “buggy” has turned into “waiting several minutes for a pageload”. I presume the new server will deal with this, but until it does I’m not as excited as I was half an hour ago.

Update 2: I’m discovering a more significant problem: British editions often don’t turn up in the Library of Congress. Unsurprisingly, these are what tend to turn up in the second hand shops around hereabouts.