MitgliedJulieMagnolia

My library has evolved over the past 45 years. It has travelled backwards and forwards across the world from England to Australia. It has been weeded just a little over the years, but I still have many of the original books that I started buying every week with my pocket money as a 12 year old in the town of Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, England. I am cataloguing my collection on LibraryThing so that I can rediscover it and then share this information with other book lovers everywhere!
I like to think that my library is like the one described by C.S. Lewis, what a wonderfully evocative description of a home library...: "It was a large room with three big windows, and it was lined from floor to ceiling with books; more books than Lucy had ever seen before, tiny little books, fat and dumpy books, and books bigger than any church Bible you have ever seen, all bound in leather and smelling old and learned and magical." from "The Magician's Book", chapter ten of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C. S. Lewis.

I am a 57 year old semi-retired librarian and, now that I no longer have an academic library to manage full-time, I have decided to tackle my home library collection! This collection has been evolving since I was twelve years old and has travelled backwards and forwards with me from the town of Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria (England) to Brisbane in Queensland (Australia) and, for a few years, to Upwey in Victoria (Australia). Being a lover of books, parting with my collection has never been an option.
Now that I am in a position to enjoy more leisure time, I have started to look at my home library with new eyes and ask myself questions such as, “I wonder how many books I actually own?” and, as my books are all double-stacked in the shelves, “What books are hidden away in the rows at the back?” Other thoughts have centred on, “What will happen to my books when I’m no longer around?” and “What a huge task for my daughters to sort through all this one day ---I can’t do that to them!”
One of my friends, another retired teacher librarian, mentioned LibraryThing to me and gradually the idea of cataloguing my own home library began to take shape. I have always loved cataloguing and I fondly remember the early days, working as a Graduate Library Assistant in the University of Queensland Library at St Lucia. As a junior cataloguer, my role was to do the descriptive cataloguing only, leaving the Library of Congress subject headings to the more experience subject specialist librarians. Before the advent of computers, I recall writing out the MARC records with their codes, poring over the huge LC Subject Headings books and spending hours filing catalogue cards in the old filing drawers ---no Online Public Access Catalogues in the earl6y 80’s!
My reasons for starting this project, the cataloguing of my home library, are varied. First of all, I am keen to refresh my memory of what I have read over the years. I like the idea of giving new life to my collection as well. These books have sat on my shelves, untouched in the main part for many years, as my own life has gone on independently and yet the collection is such a personal part of my life and says such a lot about me. Being a librarian at heart, I also want to organize the books that I own and I am interested to see how much easier the cataloguing process with LibraryThing will be than the cataloguing systems that I have used in the past.
Finally, I love the social outlet that LibraryThing offers, the sharing of books is at the very core of my being.