American Military Museum Library - Library Thing Procedures



LibraryThing Instructions

Login information is available in the Staff Accounts file.

Adding Books: Go to the tab “Add Books”

Search Where? You can search by Library of Congress, Overcat, and Amazon. The one you will use the most is Amazon, unless you have the Library of Congress Number.

Using ISBN and LC#: ISBN numbers should be searched within Amazon WITHOUT the dashes. Library of Congress Numbers are usually in the format 11-1111, please INCLUDE dash.

Searching and Results:   Adding and Editing a Book:  When you want to add the record, click on the title (before you add you can also click on “more” to see publication information, which helps in determining). Once the book is added to the library a “Recently Added” list comes up.
 * Use the ISBN or LC# if you have it
 * Use JUST the title if it is a specific/unique title
 * Use the title and any information from the Identifying # column such as TM 1-124, FM 4569, OP 821, Navpers 2231, etc. These are useful!
 * Use the title and author if the title is vague/common
 * NOTE : You may have to use any combination  of the above information,  start simple and add more information  if you get too many search results. Do not start every search with title AND author AND numbers, you will limit the search and not find the title.

 If you need to edit the record click on “edit book”. Sometimes you must edit the record to match our collection (remember the records retrieved on  LT are not always accurate    and have been edited by many people, hence a lot of duplicates). You can add to the title, edit number of copies, change the publisher, etc.

 ALSO, you can use the LibraryThing record to enhance our collection information in the Google doc. Sometimes the titles we have entered into the Google doc are not the entire title, you can copy and paste a more accurate title FROM LibraryThing TO our Google doc. If I am in doubt about our title versus LT's title, I will copy and paste it into the “Notes” column of our Google doc so that we can always match our information between our LT Library and our inventory list.  (cont. p.2) 

Recording Your Work:  In the 1 st column of the ashmlibraryinventory2012oct Google doc please use this to record what you have entered into our LibraryThing. ''You can either go down the list and skip over books you can't find in LT or you can go back to the stacks and get the information you need. It is up to you!''
 * <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%">X-added
 * <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%">n-definitely not found in LT's records
 * <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%"> -blank means you don't have enough information from the inventory list, the physical book must be checked for more information because there are many possible records retrieved (there can be several editions and printings of books, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE CORRECT BOOK, we want an accurate list of our holdings). You can go back/check the book on the shelf or move on.