Membregtippitt

I have read so many books and have so many at home, I would often buy or borrow books and discover later that I had already read them. I am a retired programmer, so I looked to my computer to solve this problem. I started writing myself an application to keep track of my own library of books and ones from the local library that I had borrowed to read.

I started with the books that I owned, and I quickly got tired of typing information into the spreadsheet I had set up. The books I had started with to catalog were ones in boxes that I didn't have shelf space for. In one of the boxes of books, I had found an old CueCat scanner that had been packed away for many years. I started looking online to see if anyone had talked about how they might be used to scan retail bar codes. One of the first few sites I found when searching was the LibraryThing site and the instructions for using the CueCat scanner.

As I looked at the site, I found that almost everything I had only dreamed of putting in my own application had already been done with the LibraryThing. Using my old CueCat, I started scanning in books and soon hit the LibraryThing limit of the number of book for a free membership. I paid my lifetime membership and years later have still not finished scanning all my books.

I love the LibraryThing almost as much as I do old books and librarians of any age.

I love reading. Many, many centuries ago, when I was in the second grade, my teacher took us to the school library for a lesson on the Dewy Decimal system and how to use the card catalog. During the tour of our small school library, the librarian told us that in life it what not as important how much we knew as much as it was important how much we knew how to find out. She told us that if we knew how to use libraries, there would be virtually no limit to what we would know how to find out.

Even before I was old enough to read, I loved books and would pester grown ups to read to me. Once I learned to read for myself, I have never stopped. I love the smell of old books. It made me very sad to learn one day that the smell of old books that I loved was actually a by-product of their decay.

I love books, I love libraries and librarians. I love card catalogs. Later in school I discovered the our local library had the New York Times on microfilm along with bound copies of the Index to articles in the New York Times. In those ancient days before computerized catalogs and indexes. the Index and microfilm of the New York Times were a treasure trove of information. Any event that interested me, I could go and find original newspaper articles to read about that event. To a kid 4 decades ago with an active imagination, it was very close to having my own time machine.