Tuesday Thingers: Sources

Today’s question from Marie at The Boston Bibliophile:

Cataloging sources. What cataloging sources do you use most? Any particular reason? Any idiosyncratic choices, or foreign sources, or sources you like better than others? Are you able to find most things through LT’s almost 700 sources?

I’m like most people I think – I use Amazon because it’s first on the list and I’m lazy. LT tells me I’ve used others, but I don’t remember doing that on purpose. I rarely have trouble finding anything because I almost always type in the ISBN. I have a few books that are too old to have ISBNs, and while I can generally find them, it’s annoying to go through pages of search results to get to them, and even more annoying to find my edition in particular. Luckily, my library is fairly young, so I haven’t had to do that very often. I have had to enter two books manually. One is a dual English/Russian book that my high school Russian teacher gave to me as practice reading. It has no sort of identification on it and typing in Russian on an American keyboard is a nightmare, so I just did my best to enter it in English. The other is a Nancy Drew book from the 50s that I couldn’t find in all my digging, so I just put it in manually. I can’t remember if I eventually found and combined it, though. It looks like I did since it isn’t in my list of books owned only by me.

Anyway, to sum up: I’m lazy and use Amazon. I like that LT has so many cataloging sources, though. Must be good for the parts of the world that don’t have an “all-knowing” Amazon.