Where's it all going to end?

"I am a sick man." So begins Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. So, Dear Reader, begins this post. I am a sick man. A cataloger. A pathological cataloger. A metadata creator. As I have wrote of before, that is one one of the reasons I love my job so much. I can quench, in part, my compulsive need to organize stuff, and to describe that organization. I have a spread sheet of my record albums, another of my compact discs, yet another of my DVDs. (I haven't undertaken one for my VHS tapes. Yet.) Yesterday, I even created a catalog in spread sheet form of my Pez dispenser collection. It's sortable by individual dispenser name, group name, and the color of the bases, or the "stumps" as I call them. Truly sad. No? Yes. About a week ago, my supervisor showed me something. Something I probably shouldn't have seen, or even known about. It's called Library Thing and I am understandably hooked. What cataloger wouldn't be? So now I am cataloging my personal library. Not just a list of all my books mind you. No. That just wouldn't be enough. (There's that word again!) No Dear Reader, I am classing my entire library using the Library of Congress classification system. Call numbers are being uniformly formatted. Split files are being reconciled. Bibliographic integrity is being verified, and maintained. I am tagging each book for ease of my use. This is a large part of the reason that I have not posted recently. The holidays are not to blame. (We did watch all five of the Planet of the Apes movies as I had intended. It was a very hairy Christmas.) But now, I catalog books all day at work, go home, and spend a few hours each evening cataloging books. I have a chart of each wall in each room of my apartment showing book shelves. When I finish a shelf, I cross it off the chart. Sooner or later I will finish. Then I can begin database cleanup and routine maintenance. One of the really cool things about my Library Thing thing is that I can include images of many of the covers of the books in my library. Incidentally, there's a widget in the works.