Up until a couple of years ago I was keeping a bibliography which had reached about a thousand items, representing the trails into non-theological territory which I hoped to follow once I had got The Eschatological Economy out of the way. This bibliography was in MS Access on my overworked laptop – the laptop that blew a gasket one morning when someone, who shall be nameless, switched her hairdryer on and off in the next room. In the cold fear of having lost the book I was working on, I just got the man in the repair shop to recover my Word files and forgot all about the bibliography, which was the only file held in any other application. And so it was gone, and I haven’t really kept a single bibliography since. I hope you take more care of your data than I do.
Anyway I have been trying out what looks like a wonderful online bibliography service – LibraryThing. It offers a variety of ways to present your book list, including with library shelf mark/Library of Congress call mark. I haven’t found a Sort function yet – I think it all has to be done with tags. And there is a fair amount of crossover of function with Amazon, though you can find people who are reading, or at least own, one particular book, so it is an online book-club too.
