TO CATALOGUE BOOKS READ BUT NOT OWNED

I have recorded all the books i have read since 1955 - at the suggestion of our English Teacher
I would like to get them into a digital catalogue but not have them included in my owned books catalogue
Making a collection for 'read books' adds a 2nd copy to main catalogue
should I just start a books read catalogue under a new login name?
cheers
Ken Morris

Just add them to the “Read by unowned” collection and remove them from “Your Library”. This won’t create a second copy. Neither does a manually added collection unless you are adding the book again instead of editing the existing one to change its collections.

Then “your Library” will be the books you own while your catalog contains all the books you had read and the ones you own (separated I to collections).

>1 ken41: Ken, if you are confused, take a look at a few other users' catalogues. For example, if you look at mine, you will see that I have created a collection called Ebooks and another called Library. The books in the Library collection are not in my Your books collection. The books in the Ebooks collection may be in my Your books, or they may be in Library, as I have borrowed many ebooks from my local library service over the past couple of years.

If you click on Your books from the top menu, you can set different Styles to look at different aspects of your information.This can be handy if you want to quickly go through the list and reallocate books to different collections.

Don't hesitate to ask questions! There is an incredible amount of functionality in LibraryThing; some you will find useful to you, some not.

Continuing from >2 AnnieMod: if you look at your catalogue (Your Books), there's a little brown square with a triangle in it in the right hand column. Click on that and it will show you which collections you have and highlights which one that book is in. Highlight 'read but unowned' and unhighlight 'your library' and that will move the book from one collection to the other. You have to do it in that order because the book has to belong to one collection or another at all points of time.

A book can belong to more than one collection at a time, too.

(I'm sure there's a faster way than moving books one at a time; it doesn't come to mind at the moment.)

>4 humouress: Power Edit can add/remove collections books to/from collections in bulk. :)

I have a related question: I would like to have all of the books in the same collection, regardless of whether I own a hard copy. However I would like to indicate which books are in my hard copy library, and which not. Should I just make a “hard copy library” tag or is there a better way? Thanks!

>6 Earleybird: You can use tags. You can also use the format field. Or you can make a separate collection - a book can be in more than one collection.

It all depends on how you want to use the data and what works for you and the way you use the site.

>7 AnnieMod: Thanks for the reminder; I'd forgotten that I have 'Media' as a column in one of my settings.

>6 Earleybird: LibraryThing has different collections already set up, which you can use or not as you want: All collections (everything you enter on LT automatically goes here), Your library, Read but unowned, Wishlist, Currently reading, To read.

For instance, I record library books in 'read but unowned'; books I actually own in 'your library'; I don't use 'wishlist' (in this account). I have created my own collections for 'Hardback/ paperback' and for 'e-books'. That way I can see (by choosing that collection from the drop-down box at the top left) when I own a physical copy or if I need to look in my e-book collection for it (and all the books in those collections also go into my 'Your Library' collection). So I can see them all together in 'your library' and I can see all the books I've recorded on LT in 'all collections'; as >7 AnnieMod: says, you can have a book in more than one collection at the same time.

Thanks for the replies! Since my main purpose is to have a single library of all the books and media of interest, regardless of whether I own a hard copy, audio version (or neither), sounds like tags will be fine.

>2 AnnieMod: this is what I did. I also have a collection for Wishlist.