library mitch

so i'm venturing out in the "web 2.0" world once more by signing up for librarything.com. I nearly signed up for it a year and a half ago, but I backed out at the last minute after a small email conversation with its founder.  Given that librarything's servers are located in the USA, their data is subject to that nation's egregious PATRIOT ACT.  As I've said all along, I know that any data on me - aggregate or otherwise - doesn't amount to a hill of beans, but all the same, the stubborn, principled person that I am forced me to back down on the prospect of signing up.  I eventually turned to Delicious Library to catalogue my library instead.

A serious hard drive failure (i.e. complete data loss) last December effaced my own mini-OPAC from existence, though.  I can turn back to Delicious Library and begin to re-catalogue everything, but I instead began to reconsider LT.com, instead.  So, a week or two ago, my quixotic person beat down that stubborn, principled person, and together went ahead and signed up, PATRIOT ACT be damned...

So far, in some ways, I'm liking what I've see..  I do miss Delicious's integration with a camera to catalogue my items by their ISBNs, but LT.com is pretty damn quick at searching Amazon to correctly match items to their original ISBNs.  The folksonomic tagging system is pretty nice too.  Who can't like folksonomy?  Tags give us the chance to catalogue whatever we have by whatever we want, so go us - it definitely is the (false) reign of the individual in this aspect.

But I'm still a little confused by the point to it all.  Delicious Library's mission is clear - to catalogue your Stuff.  Librarything, on the other hand, loves to promote its social-networking capabilities.  They're incredibly proud of the fact that we can find and connect with people who have "eerily similar" interests and tastes in lit.  So what?  Who cares?  I guess this part just doesn't appeal to me; perhaps there are people out there who need the internet to find people who have similar tastes in books.  Well, good on them and good on LT.com.  For now, I think I'll just stick the cataloguing aspect.

(kinda hypocritical social-networking cite:  link to my librarything account here.)