[Sigia-l] OT: Library Thing

[William Quimby]

A scholar (or someone with scholarly pretensions) probably has a few hundred
books on her/his research topic. A finely detailed and described personal
collection would help 'cause..,

- many "books" are actually gatherings of individual essays, and it could be
helpful to be able to locate the essays promptly (via being cataloged along with
the book) in order to follow the thread of a particularly author or subject.

- the Introduction or Preface might be by a separate author, and again it may be
helpful to know to track that individual's thoughts,

- the Edition could make a difference (was this book on Soviet Communism written
before Kruschev's denunciation of Stalin? And is there a second edition written
after?)

- would you prefer to be able to search by your own subject terms? The scholar
on a new interdisciplinary track is often out of luck using a traditional
library catalog.

Point - there may be a lot of useful information in the collection that "data
mining" could dig out.

- Bill

Listera wrote:

> 
> But after playing with it for a while, I had to ask myself, who uses this 
> stuff? Do people actually catalog their physical media possessions? Why would
> anyone spend so much time on this? I remain curious.
> 


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