I haven’t mentioned it for a while, but I’ve been continuing to add to my LibraryThing catalog over the past several months. In case you’re curious, I’m now up to 1,245 (holy crap!) books entered, which comprises the bulk of my personal library. All I have left to do is a couple boxes of collectible books (the ones which live inside archival plastic sleeves and Aren’t For Reading) and a stack of children’s and young-adult books I found inside my old toy box. Obviously, this little data entry project has been a god-awful amount of work, but I don’t regret it one bit. For one thing, it’s been gratifying to get a handle on what exactly I own (when you have over 1,000 books, it’s easy to forget that you’ve got any one particular title) and fun to share that information with my Three Loyal Readers (there goes my exhibitionistic streak again!). But it’s also useful, I’ve decided, to have an inventory list stored somewhere other than in the same place where I actually keep my stuff. What good does a local inventory stored on my home PC accomplish if the house burns down and I lose everything? With LibraryThing, I have a list that I can access from anywhere and show to my insurance company in the event of a disaster.
That logic started me thinking that I really ought to set up something similar for my other valuable collections, especially my movies. A lot of googling led me DVDSpot.com, which is essentially the same thing as LibraryThing only specialized for those shiny silver discs we all love so much. I don’t like its interface quite as well as LibraryThing’s, and some of the community features that I enjoy on LT are lacking. Also, I would’ve liked to have some capability for cataloging VHS movies as well, since I still have a lot of those. But it does the DVD job well enough, and I didn’t find any online service that considered VHS. I guess a media format is well and truly dead when you can’t even find a way to inventory your legacy titles.
Anyway, cataloging my DVDs didn’t take nearly as long as my books, so without further fanfare, I now present to you Bennion’s DVDSpot catalog. I’ll put a link in the sidebar as well. Happy browsing!
Congratulations on almost finishing the LT entry. 1245! Very impressive. At this point we share 26 books, most of them twentieth century novels.
Thanks again for turning me on to Library Thing. It’s become an indispensable way to manage my books and reading lists.
My pleasure, Robert – I’m glad you’ve been enjoying it. Do you find it at all curious or alarming that we only have 26 books in common, though, given the size of our respective libraries? I honestly expected more…
i’m more concerned that Striking Distance is in your Netflix queue… that and full ownership of Buffy the Vampire slayer in your owned collections. You can come finish my basement if you have THAT much time on your hands 😉
Three things:
1) I don’t have the complete Buffy series, only the good seasons (before the show switched over to UPN).
2) I saw Striking Distance in the $5 bin but thought I’d better preview it before I spent even that much (it slipped by me when we ran it at the theater).
3) What’s to finish in your basement? You’ve got your TV room and your office…