If you or your workplace have a decent-sized book collection, you might have thought of organising or cataloguing it in some way. If so, I recommend you give LibraryThing a try. It’s free (or $20 for a lifetime membership), and has lots of amazing social features, where you can see who else has your books, read and post reviews, find other books you might like—and even books that LibraryThing thinks you won’t. LibraryThing also makes it possible to embed a little widget into your home page or blog that lists your recent acquisitions, if you want to tell the world what you’re reading.

If you need to catalogue hundreds of books, I recommend you get a USB-powered hand-held barcode scanner. You can point the scanner at the barcode on the cover, import the ISBN, and LibraryThing will look up the book in Amazon, your nearby public library catalogue, or any other library you use, and import all its information for you. You can blitz your book collection in just a couple of hours.

ProfHacker has a nice overview, and LibraryThing’s founder, Tim Spalding, gave a presentation at LIANZA 2009 which is an excellent introduction to all it can do, and food for thought for traditional librarians.