Backup list of books from LibraryThing to Excel. Is it possible?

Hello there,

I'm loving LibraryThing to catalog and add books from the library I'm working on. I would also really like to have a backup list of the books, with their metadata pulled from LibraryThing and easily saved in an Excel spread. Has anyone done this?

Thanks for any tips!

J.S.

It's possible to export from LT to a variety of formats (from http://www.librarything.com/more/import). The tab-delimited one is mostly complete (i.e. contains almost all of the fields in the LT catalog; I can't remember the exceptions offhand but I think there are one or two); I've only ever used the Excel format once or twice, for debugging when it was new, and can't speak to its completeness.

It's not a backup in the traditional sense, though. It's an offsite copy, but you couldn't use it to restore your LT catalog with all the metadata intact - the import only contains a few fields and if you have an ISBN it will overwrite even those with what it finds from sources. (I've complained about this for years. The best I've gotten in response is being treated like an idiot who thinks all of LT is a giant spreadsheet, so I think it's unlikely to change, even though there's massive room for improvement before tackling the issues I was condescended to about.)

Thank you so much! An offsite copy is exactly what I need.

>3 NMMNHS: And if you are a computer geek you can write a program to fetch the copy and save it in a version control system or run it through a sanity check etc. automatically.