Thursday, December 30, 2010

Librarything - a genealogist's friend

My post yesterday reminded me that I had not blogged about one of my favourite tools for over two years. I love Librarything the online tool that serves as my reading log, personal library catalogue, book recommendation tool and conduit to other booklovers with similar interests.

Although I use this tool for all things bookish I find that it is a wonderful tool for genealogy. As one enters books into the database one can tag them with descriptors. The tag "Genealogy" has been used 38,731 times to date to describe works in the database. The books most often tagged genealogy are:

As this list has a US bias one could search for books tagged Genealogy and Australia. I would not describe all of the books in this list as genealogy but those titles may provide infomration on,life in ancestors' countries at a particular point in time. The top titles in this list are:
Librarything also lists users who have used the term genealogy, there are over 1700 people who have used the tag "genealogy. By looking at people with similar libraries on can follow them. I follow a few people with similar interests but only one Australian genealogist " Carole Riley" who has 237 books tagged "genealogy". 
 "A free account Librarything allows you to catalog up to 200 books. A paid account allows you to catalog any number of books. Paid personal accounts cost $10 for a year or $25 for a lifetime." A $US25 investment for such a useful and powerful resource represents great value.
 

1 comment:

Carole Riley said...

I started using LibraryThing for data CDs, that's why there are so many for genealogy. All those Cornwall parish registers!

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