Taking my cue from Jennifer’s announcement that she’s finished updating her LibraryThing catalogue, I’ve gone and done the same thing. You can view the results here.

The steps I took were as follows:

1. Upgrade to a paid lifetime membership with LibraryThing (US$25 via PayPal).
2. Export my library data from Delicious Library.
3. Make my LibraryThing library private.
4. Upload the library data file using LibraryThing’s import feature.
5. As the library file uploads (it’s throttled to avoid overloading the library and Amazon servers LibraryThing uses to look up book data), delete duplicate books.
6. Delete the books that are definitely Jen’s. (We use Delicious Library to manage our combined book collection; LibraryThing is social software, so it’s got a different purpose: because books say something about the person, I want the books I chose to say it.)
7. Delete the books that I don’t want you to know I have. (Heh.)
8. Make my library public again.
9. Spend hours tinkering with each entry — editing fields, choosing cover art, and so forth. Automatic importing is fast, but it’s imprecise; this will probably be a neverending task.
10. Add a nifty badge to the McWetlog’s sidebar.

One observation during this process: LibraryThing is a lot more feature-rich than it was when I first started using it. It’s come a long way in a short time, and I’m very impressed.