Searching from every sources when adding a new book

Hi Everyone,

When adding a book to my collection, how can I search for the book from every source?
I've added a lot of book manually, then I found a source, where most of the added books were in.
Thank you in advance.

Máté Menyhárt

You can't. It would be an enormous waste of computer resources to search every source, and sources would quickly ban LT because they were being overwhelmed.

Most of your books seem to be in Hungarian, so it would make sense to start with Hungarian National Library - Országos Széchényi Könyvtár. For English language books, OverCat is a good place to start.

For books that are unlikely to be in sources it is probably fastest to just enter manually rather than spending a long time searching.

>2 MarthaJeanne: Thank you for helping! I'll try to search in Hungarian National Library's database.

>1 MMate2007: If you have the LibraryThing App, it will search your list of sources in order until it can find a result (if any). Maybe try that? https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/LibraryThing_App

>1 MMate2007:

I've added a lot of book manually, then I found a source, where most of the added books were in.

One thing you can do is to check the catalogs of those members who already have the book to see what source they used.

(>2 MarthaJeanne: is right about the waste of resources - LT uses just shy of 5,000 sources!)

kristilabrie (#4):

If you have the LibraryThing App, it will search your list of sources in order until it can find a result (if any)

Any reason that functionality wasn't made available on the main site? We'd been asking for it for years before the app was even introduced!

>6 lorax: Yes, I entirely agree.
The absence of this feature on the web-page is a major mistake.

EVERY source? Don't you realize how many sources there are world wide? A search like that could take hours, or days.

>8 Nicole_VanK: that's true, but selecting just some sources could be useful.