I'm still slogging my way through entering my library into LibraryThing. It's a marvelous tool, and is getting better each day; unfortunately, it isn't the fastest thing in the world. This is a particular problem when you have as many fringe books as I do, which require additional research or manual entry to get the right edition. For example, at this writing I am the only LibraryThing user with Mackey's Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (two volumes), or with the edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream illustrated by Charles Vess.

So given that I have a few thousand books in my library (comics largely excluded), and thus far I've managed to enter a whopping five hundred titles, it is reasonable to ask why I bother. There are three reasons.

First, it gives me an off-site back-up of what I own, should something unfortunate occur. My house has been burglarized twice, and both times DVDs and CDs were stolen (along with many other items). By having inventories I was able to quickly identify what was missing and needed to be replaced, although some discs were long out of print. (I still wonder what those little bastards thought when they sat down to watch Liquid Sky.) Plus, it doesn't hurt if I need to negotiate with the insurance company for replacement funds if a hurricane rips the roof off my house and deposits several thousand gallons of water within the walls.

Additionally, I'm learning about the practical applications of categorization. Determining the right tags to use to describe each book takes some thought, and I find myself going back to the first two hundred and re-tagging them as my understanding of the aggregate changes. I am somewhat new to this folksonomy business, but it looks as though having almost 65,000 LibraryThing users tag over 4.5 million titles provides a decent statistical base for my own decisions.

Perhaps most importantly, I am being reacquainted with my own library. I have books from my childhood, cultural artifacts, and more signed books than I had known. Plus I've found collections I hadn't known I was forming, and interests I had forgotten that have been rekindled. Much of this has lead me to do more research, and some of that reading may end up on these pages. Of course, some of this has lead me to realize I own a lot of crap I don't want or need: eBay, here I come!

All in all, though, I've become convinced that LibraryThing is one of the more interesting web applications I've seen in quite a while. Now that they have a partner who has pledged non-interference, it looks as though it has a bright future.