Most, if not all, teachers have extensive collections of books in their classrooms, oftentimes for student use.  Knowing precisely what books are in your collection and who they may have been lent out to.  LibraryThing provides an online way to accomplish that.

LibraryThing is a very powerful tool for managing and sharing your collection of books.  Adding a book to your LibraryThing collection can be done in one of two ways.  The first is as simple as entering the title of your book.  LibraryThing searches the extensive Amazon.com database (or any of almost 700 other databases) for a match and displays the results.  You then add your book by clicking on the image of its cover.  LibraryThing lets you add detailed information to each book including tags, comments, summaries, ratings, acquisition dates, reading dates, and more.

The second method for adding a book is even easier, but requires a CueCat (make sure to get a USB one) or other barcode scanner.  The scanner is used to read the books’ ISBN barcodes which are then compared against the above-mentioned databases.  You can also use a scanner to create a text file containing many ISBN numbers to add several books at once.

Strengths

• Extensive databases contain information about most books  you may have (books not found in a database can be manually added)
• Support for ISBN numbers and scanners can ease the process of creating your collection
• Extensive features for sharing, rating, and receiving recommendations can greatly increase the usefulness of your collection

Weaknesses

• Free accounts are limited to 200 books
• No built-in method for handling circulation needs (many users use tags or comments for this purpose)
• LibraryThing uses ISBN-13 and ISBN-13+5.  Many older books may have ISBN-10.
• Lack of separate user and administrator accounts

LibraryThing offers several levels of service.  The free service allows you access to all features with a limit of 200 books.  You can upgrade to a paid account which removes that limit for $10/year or $25 for a lifetime membership.  You will need to create an account to use LibraryThing, but you are only required to provide them with an email address if you want the ability to retrieve lost usernames and passwords.

To use LibraryThing requires a computer with Internet access (dialup will work for this) and a modern web browser.  If you want to scan your books’ ISBN numbers, you will need a compatible barcode reader.