Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Tuesday Thingers - July 29, 2008

Today's question is about LibraryThing cataloging sources.

Today's question: Cataloging sources. What cataloging sources do you use most? Any particular reason? Any idiosyncratic choices, or foreign sources, or sources you like better than others? Are you able to find most things through LT's almost 700 sources?

I use Amazon for most of the mass-market fiction because academic libraries just don't have it. For other things, I tend to use Library of Congress, Ohiolink, ILCSO (Illinois libraries), and ACCESS Pennsylvania most. I have a lot of New England things and will often check New England Library Consortium for them first. I have a lot of East Tennessee items and will check Knox County (Tennessee) Public Library for those. I once had something published in Ireland and was able to find a library over there. I have had to enter a few by hand, but sometimes I'm just too lazy to keep adding libraries to check them. I know that a few things like genealogy conference syllabi and family histories that are "non-published" are just not going to be there so I tend to add those manually. I technically have over 200 manual entries, but most of them fall into the categories above. I also find myself entering far less by hand now than I did a year ago.

No comments: