The Travelin' Librarian

I’ve had a Library Thing account for 24 hours now and I have some initial reactions. I’m hoping that a few of my complaints are just me now knowing how to perform the actions I believe are missing from the service. If I’m in need of correction, please do so.

• The Fun statistics page is very interesting. However, why can’t I click on any of these numbers to see which of my books is generating them? For example, I’d love to figure out which five titles were not in Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk and needed to be looked up in the Library of Congress.
• Speaking of the Fun statistics page why were most books looked up in “amazon.com” while the newest one, the one I entered manually instead of importing I’m assuming, was looked up in “Amazon.com”. I’m sure this is just a system bug but I do find it slightly annoying.
• Speaking of the statistics, ISBNs didn’t exist before the late 70s. But, according to my stats page, I’ve got eleven books with ISBNs published prior to 1970. This must be an error in the system as they dates are “the edition’s publication date, not date of original work” so technically such a statistic is impossible.
• I imported 59 titles to test the system before purchasing my account and importing my full collection. However, the system didn’t de-dupe. (I’m assuming this is by design since, theoretically, someone may want to own two copies of the exact same edition of a title.) However, I how have 59 titles that are in the system twice but I only own one copy of. I’d like a way to search for duplicates so I can delete the spare record.
• Regarding tagging: Every other service that supports tagging I’ve used has you enter multiple tags as space delimited. So, tot his point I’ve been trained to separate my tags with spaces and enter multiple-word tags with quotation marks. Library Thing does not follow this implied standard. Library Thing requires a comma delimited list of entered tags with spaces indicating a multi-word tag. Because of this I ended up with some books tagged as “sf scifi uk tv doctor who”. Luckily I caught this early and was able to clean them up. I guess I just wonder why Library Thing feels they need to do things differently from everyone else.