Of making many books...

I have added a few features to my blog here both for my benefit and the benefit of several of those with whom I work.

First, you will notice above my reading list on the right hand side of the page a link to my Amazon.com wishlist. This I offer out of the kindness of my heart to anyone struggling with what to get me for my birthday, or Christmas, or father's day, or pastoral intern day, or...well...you get the idea. The thought of people out there in the cold and dark of the world, struggling with what to get me as a gift was keeping me awake at night.

Second, I found a website at the end of last year that has just knocked my socks off! For all of you fellow bibliophiles, this is a great resource! It is called "library thing" and can be found at librarything.com. This website allows you to catalog your library with incredible ease. you simply enter a partial title or ISBN number and it goes out to one of more than 70 libraries and retrieves the book with full biblio data. If it gets the info from Amazon, it usually has a picture of the book cover as well. Once you have found the book you are looking for, simply click on it and it adds it to your library. Once you have begun to develop your library, you can search your library, organize it by title, author, publisher, LC Call #, etc. You can also assign multiple tags to your books in order to organize them however you like. Not sure where to place that book on the shelf? Does Preaching Christ from the Old Testament go in your preaching section or your OT section? Let the LC decide! And with this you have the LC at your fingertips.

I'm still entering my books and getting things organized, but I've already added my library to the blog. You can find it at the icon to the left.

To my fellow interns: Want to borrow a book? You can find out if I own it and if it is at the office or at my house...even if I'm not around to figure it out. Just go to my library thing and check the tags for home library or office library. If I have it at the office, help yourself.

And one final note to all my wonderful book collecting friends. Have you ever considered how you would prove the contents of your library if it was ever lost in a fire? If not librarything.com, at least find something and make sure you are cataloging those books!

Matt