It's been about a week since we've moved into our new place and things are still cluttered all around. The apartment has become a collection of mini-organization projects everywhere. One such project is our book collection. We have a buttload of books. Our old place had a third bedroom to store/display our books, but it's clear that there's no room for them in our new place. We made the decision to only have a handful of books on our tiny shelf, and the rest of the books will go into storage. That would have been all fun and good, except that I need some of these books from time-to-time and don't want to be hunting through 5 giant storage boxes each time.

I did a little research on how to catalog books quickly and easily. I absolutely did not want to be the guy typing in authors/titles for hours and hours. I came across a few book cataloging projects online and finally came across LibraryThing. I would describe it as social networking for book lovers. They have a nice search engine where you can just input the ISBN number for a book and it'll fill in the rest. But even that can be slow, so they have a feature where you can use a webcam to scan the barcodes of your books and the website will import them into your virtual library. Webcam scanning isn't completely integrated into their service, so it required a little extra effort to get it to work.

Of the 128 books I scanned last night, most of them were easily recognized by the system. The few that returned errors were due to custom barcodes stickers that the bookstore placed over the original ISBN barcode. I estimate that we have close to 400 books here so it's really much more efficient than brute-force typing each book into a spreadsheet.

I've tagged the books with box numbers, designating where they're going in storage. Later when I need to find a book again, I can just search my LibraryThing catalog and find its location. If this PhD thing doesn't pan out, could I be a librarian?