A few years ago, I discovered LibraryThing. This is a website that allows you to catalog your books, tag them so that you can locate titles you have for a given subject, and track lending. What a find for a family with as many books as we have! At the moment, it tells me that we have 2,485 books. I have found this site very useful when I’m organizing a school year, and also when I want to know if we have a particular book or not. Now, if only it could keep the books on the shelf organized, as well!
However, this is not intended to be an advertisement for LibraryThing. Sometime after I had cataloged all our books, I had a brainstorm one morning. Here we have all these good books on our shelf, and many of them sit there year after year without being read. How can we share them with other people? So, I checked out LibraryThing, and lo and behold they had come up with a catalog that can be shared with anyone! So, if you live in New Zealand and want to borrow our books, you are welcome to browse our catalog on TinyCat and see if there are books you want or need. Enter a title, author, or topic in the search box. When you are looking at the record for a title, there are many words in blue; each of these is a link that will take you to everything else we have with that topic or from that author. To borrow a book, click on the “Ask About This” button and I will get an email and get in contact with you about it.
Edited 8 August 2021: These photos were taken today, after completely reorganizing the library and filling the new shelves we just built. At the moment, we should be able to find any book we own, quickly!
Edit 25 August 2024: Since that paragraph was written, we have expanded the library more. As you can see in this post, we now have shelves all around the hallway. We have added labels on the spines of the books to make it easier to keep them organized, and at the moment we have over 3,400 books in our collection!
We only ask for you to pay postage for the books. I will send them out as soon as the postage is paid for. If you want to donate a little extra for the use of our library, we will buy more books with it! We put a due date of two months on the books, but if you need them for longer, just tell us. Also, if you lose or accidentally destroy a book, we would appreciate if you replace it for us. Thank you!
One caveat: If you see a title on here that sounds like something we wouldn’t read, it may be one that I haven’t read yet! I have a terrible habit of buying books that I don’t have time to read!