Keeping Track of It All

A review of a library management app

I own a lot of books. Not as many as I once did, but still. There are a lot of books in this house. And by a lot I mean… I don’t really know how many. However! I shortly will know, because I finally broke down and realized the best way to handle acquisitions without too many duplications was to go ahead and create a catalog of my personal library. This won’t be the first time I’ve attempted such a thing. Several years ago with the help of enthusiastic¹ children, we did catalog the library. Then, we moved, shedding books along the way as you do.²

Part of the fiction collection

Now that we are settled into this house, I am putting down roots³ and acquired bookshelves which are floor to ceiling, and then as I was visiting with family, my grandmother gifted me with multiple boxes of books… Whew. I needed something. Also, my son calls asking ‘do we have x book?’ and I’d like to be able to give friends an idea of what’s on my shelves so they don’t buy a duplicate book while doing research. You get the idea.

Part of the cookbook collection, with the new acquisitions stacked until I clear a shelf for them!

I knew of LibraryThing, and I think it may have been one of the programs my boss dabbled with for cataloging when I was working at a very small public library. What I went looking for was a personal library management program, free⁴ and which would enable me to access the library database from my phone while I’m standing in a bookstore, antique mall, you name it. There are a few options, but this looked like the best and I recognized it as something I’d used before. If I could lay hands on a card catalog? I totally would. But I still need this, so I can check the collection when not at home.

Now, cataloging my library poses some special challenges. If you have books which are barcoded, and you’re using a smartphone, LibraryThing allows for quick and easy accessioning by scanning the codes.

You line up the barcode in that little highlighted window and boom, there it is. Unless it’s an older mass market paperback, or other book which didn’t have the ISBN in the barcode.

If, however, you have a book which predates the barcode system, then you’ll either want to search by the ISBN, or the title. I also have books - a lot of them - which predate the ISBN or SBN system of numbering. I discovered to my delight that the voice to text in the search bar of the LibraryThing app on my phone works a treat. I was able to put about forty books into my collection in about twenty minutes, and that was with a few tricky ones. I also discovered that for about 130 books I entered during the trial phase of this, I had to manually enter roughly 6 books because they simply were not popping up in the database LibraryThing uses.

Which was very interesting, because the search accesses Amazon, the Library of Congress catalog, OverCat, and some overseas (mostly British) databases. I didn’t expect the cookbook which seems to have been hand-made by the Siuslaw Valley Pioneer Society to be in there, but the fact that my 1932 Proceedings of the Texas Folklore Society didn’t show up surprised me. I’m sure as I get through this project I’ll find more like those. The good thing? Manual entry is really easy to do. You can be as complicated or simple with data entry as you like, although I err on the side of more data is better. Also, you can snap a photo of the book cover and upload that really easily from the phone app. I did most of my manual entries on the desktop interface, then uploaded the covers from the phone, to save time and frustration.

On the desktop, you can access your library and see all the books in it. You can also set up collections to add the books to, if you want to be able to sort rapidly by categories. I don’t see a way to add a collection on the phone app, so I was setting those up on the desktop to choose when I was adding books on the phone. Also, while you are adding books, if you have a collection selected, it will default to that with each book you’re adding until you change it. Handy if you are adding a bunch of books in the same category (as I was with my mythology bookcase).

You can also, from the desktop, look at the details of each book you’ve entered. This one, Stories of the Benin Empire, is one I had to manually add, although it seems to have already been somewhere in the database as other members of LibraryThing report it in their library. I uploaded a cover for the first time, though, which makes me feel good about contributing to the community data.

Finally, you can generate a permanent link to share your library, if you look at the far bottom left of the ‘Your Books’ tab. It will look something like this: https://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=cedarlili&collection=-1&shelf=list

Also, you can review and rate books, mark books you have read but don’t own, and other categories which will help track your reading. There are fields for comments both public and private, which would be useful for retracing one’s steps in a research project. You can add tags to the books which help in search strings. I bought a condensed Dewey Decimal System book to help me get the library organized, but LibraryThing also helps with that on the detail page of a given book. I suspect there are more features I haven’t even noticed yet, which will be fun to explore.

Overall, I am very happy with this, and do recommend it for those of my readers with a sizeable personal library. For me to be able to do a quick reference when I am book shopping it will be a great tool. Being able to share the library catalog with local writers also makes me happy as I do still have the heart of a librarian⁵ and probably always will! I suspect it will be a useful tool for research projects, as well, as I sometimes forget what I have on the shelves!

1. I was paying them. Paid chores were how they earned pocket money, and I got odd stuff done like a pantry inventory, and a library cataloging.

2. More than you plan, generally, when boxes get taken for donation which weren’t intended to go!

3. Literally, with a couple dozen fruit trees.

4. Or at least, not subscription pricing. Happy to pay for a modest lifetime license but won’t do a subscription unless I have no choice in the matter.

5. Not in a jar on my desk. Really. I promise.