Further notes on Library Thing

1.  1600 books down! Only, er, 3400+ more to go.
2.  The ISBN search, while annoying from a typist's perspective, is nevertheless far more efficient than the title/name searches.  This is especially the case when entering older editions of Penguin Classics or Oxford World's Classics.
3.  Somewhat oddly, I'm finding Amazon's catalogue to be marginally more useful than LOC; it's much more likely to have that random book in Everyman's Library. 
4.  There are some strange returns in the searches, including mismatched titles, authors, and ISBNs (e.g., Robert Peters and Peter Allan Dale "authoring" each other's books).

Comments

[Bill Tozier]

It's a testament to library science through the ages that, while we've been trying to identify the 1000+ rare(r) books we've bought for Distributed Proofreaders, the odd mismatches come up so infrequently. Interestingly, many of the worst do come from the LOC; a lot of old potboilers and subscription-service novels seem to be listed at LOC as "from an old catalog".

But it's disconcerting to come across something that's actually wrong. In the Library.

[Bill Tozier]

[Vague -- the "we" identifying old books in the previous comment are my wife and me; not library scientists.]

[William Wend]

When I added my collection I did it using ISBN for the most part. The weird and random older editions of some books I had I was actually able to find, for the most part, using Amazon.

[genevieve]

Sure, libraries can make mistakes, or more commonly, run out of resources to spend on correcting them. Simply reforming politically incorrect or inconsistent subject headings creates a huge backlog in any library.