About the 19th Century Legal Historical Books Project

This Project tries to help users and libraries enhance the information obut historical legal documents with tags, recommendations, reviews, and other features.

Your Legal Historical books

You can create and edit collections within your library with the All collections menu. Choose Edit collections to add, remove or edit collections within your book list.

Suggestions:

• Double-click a box to edit the information in it.
• Customize which columns you want to display by choosing a display style.
• Sort your catalog by clicking on the name of the column (e.g. Author, Title, Date). Click once to show in ascending (i.e. A-Z) order or click twice to show in decending (i.e. Z-A) order. A little blue triangle will appear next to the name of the column that you are sorting. You can also use the sort button.
• Click the printer icon to create a printable list of your catalog.
• You can search through your library using the search box. You can limit your search to a specific field (e.g. Titles, Authors, Tags, Reviews). Choose a field from the drop-down menu at the right of the search box.

Add Legal historical books

Start your historical library by adding books to it. Click the Add books tab. In the search box on the left, enter a title, author or an ISBN. Search results will appear on the right side of the screen. Click on a book to add it to your library.

If the book you entered does not show on the screen you will need to add it manually. Click Add manually under the heading Other options.

Suggestions:

• Many members like to tag their books. What are tags? To tag your books as you enter them, fill in the Tags to add field before you click search. Separate tags with commas.
• Click (more) under a book title to display more information about a book, such as the edition.
• Click show quick edit to add and edit tags, ratings or reviews of the book right after you add it. To edit more information, click in the icon.
• For faster entry, use the * key on your numberpad instead of the X in an ISBN.

Tips for adding books without an ISBN

First, if you manually add a book without an ISBN, be careful when typing in the title and author. Without an ISBN, these are the only fields the Legal Historial Books project has to identify your book and connect it to other users who list that book in their catalog. It is generally best to enter the author (last name, first name) and title as they appear on your book’s full title page (the book cover will often abbreviate one or both of these).

So, you don’t want to enter all the info into the manual book entry form?

Add a book by searching the title and author on the Add Books page (Amazon, Library of Congress, etc). But, be prepared to edit this entry to match your book/edition. The book you find will have an ISBN, so it is likely to be a different edition from your no-ISBN book. Also, data from Amazon and most other sources are not without errors.

Use the Legal Historial Books project search function to find your book in someone else’s catalog on Legal Historial Books project. When you have found the book and are on the “works” page for that book, there will be a green ‘plus’ sign to the right. Click on that ‘plus’ sign, and you’ll be brought to the Add Books page, with the search field prefilled.

Another way to add books without an ISBN is to use the LCCN (Library of Congress Card Number, or Library of Congress Control Number) which has been in use since 1898. Most American publishers began including the LCCN on the back of their books’ title pages in the 1940’s or 1950’s. Important for Legal Historial Books project users is that professional librarians also included the LCCN in their catalogs years before the ISBN was included. Therefore, searching for the LCCN when adding older books to LibraryThing can make entry faster and easier than typing in the whole author and title. For books published in 2000 and earlier, the LCCN is two digits, a hyphen, and a serial number (for example, 67-15502); in 2001 and after, the 4 digit year of publication comes before the hyphen (for example, 2007-009573).

No way to add a book that’s already in the system without searching for it externally again

If you are looking at a book in the system (because other members have it in their libraries), when you click “Add to your library”, you are taken to the search screen which searches the book at other websites. If it is not found, you must enter the information manually, or go directly to the other person’s library and check what source they added the book from. This is a really unfortunate surprising limitation.

Work pages

Each book you add to your library connects you to other people on the legal Historical Books project through its work page. The work page gives you library-quality data about a book and shows you who else has the book and what they think about it.

Suggestions:

• Click on a book title to visit its work page.
• Click details to see more information about a book.
• Click Edit book to edit the book’s data, or to add a review, rating or tags.
• In the Common Knowledge section, double-click a box to add and edit facts about the book or click the icon.
• Click Change cover to upload your own cover image, or select a different cover.

Author pages

Each book in your library is also connected to an author page for that work. The author page gives you personal information about an author, events for an author on LibraryThing Local, books they have written, links, member ratings, related tags, and much more.

Suggestions:

• Click on an author’s name to visit their author page.
• In the Common Knowledge section, double-click a box to add and edit facts about the author or click the icon.
• Links associated with the author (e.g. an official web page, a Facebook profile, a publisher’s web page). These links can be listed in the green box on the right side of the screen.