I finally decided to set up a LibraryThing catalogue of my books. I’ve so far added most of my archaeology books in English, and I must say that it’s far better and easier to work with than expected. The only major annoyance that I’ve so far encountered is that it is sometimes very difficult and often impossible to find books published in German, French and Italian – not to speak of Danish. Of course, this means that my catalogue will never be complete, and that slightly annoys me.
Update: I see that LibraryThing now has added the collections of the Danish Royal Library and several other European libraries. Now they just need to sort out full support of the Danish letters ø, æ and å!
I think they will be dealing with other languages – for German and French, you just use the drop down bar to go to German/FRench Amazon or libraries.
Italian … I entered them manually. Greek and Turkish too !
It’s still better than nothing.
It’s certainly a lot better than nothing! It’s just that the whole point of a catalogue is to be as complete as possible.
I couldn’t find the titles on Amazon.fr or .de. Many of them are old and out of print. I will try to manually enter them – eventually.
They keep adding sources, so it is getting better. When I joined it was a Beta site – not sure if it still is or not.
It still says Beta but such sites are in that state for a very long time. They have made many great changes since I first signed up, which isn’t very long ago.
You can also always add books manually – not ideal, but it does mean you *can* have a complete catalogue if you really want it!
Jeremy