Library Thing
The home library catalog
About a year ago, I managed to score some amazing bookcases at shockingly reasonable prices. I wrote up that adventure if you missed it, because it was fun and a lot of work and so very worth it. A year later, I have no regrets.
One thing that having all the books neatly on shelves precipitated was a total organization of the library. Prior to this, it had been roughly sorted, but still chaotic in places from the last move a few years before. Then, once I had the fiction and non-fiction divided out, I went on to get the non-fiction sectioned into something resembling categories (I even bought a Dewey Decimal book… and didn’t use it much but that may still happen). Finally, I threw up my hands, and went looking for an app to keep the home library cataloged. I had several reasons for wanting to build out a catalog of my books.
For one thing, when I’m standing in a bookstore (particularly a used bookstore), I need to be able to search my library and make sure I’m not buying yet another copy of Robert Heinlein’s Star Beast. Not that I don’t love it, and not that I am adverse to adopting the Ben Yalow system of keeping duplicates to give to someone who has never read that book and really should. It’s just that I want to know, and I want to be able to make that decision before I buy it, which means pulling out my phone, and searching the catalog remotely when I’m hours from home.
For another, I can add tags and categories to my books so when I’m working on a research project for a book or other thing, I can search internally to my own library rather than haring off to buy more books. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. However, if I’m in a rush it’s nice to be able to lay hands on the suitable book in the moment. It’s easier to Google, sure, but I prefer the depth and accuracy of a book in most cases. Lowering the energy needed to find that book means I’ll be a better researcher and writer.
There are a number of ways to accomplish this. One would be a simple spreadsheet. With a few hundred books (at the time I wasn’t sure how many I actually had in the house) that gets very unwieldy. As I was researching ways to set up a personal library catalog, I came across Library Thing, and immediately remembered using it when I worked as a librarian many years ago. The small public library where I was working used the subscription model of that app to track check-in and check-out. I didn’t need that, although I do intend to make my catalog available to the local writer’s group of friends, but Library Thing itself is free, manageable both as a phone app and a desktop catalog, and best of all, relatively easy to enter stacks and stacks of books into.
Six months later, I finally finished putting my library into the catalog. I know how many books are living in my house - close to 3000 - although that number does include DVDs and some but certainly not all my ebooks (which are numbered about 2500 on my Amazon collection alone), so there’s that. I can, and did this just yesterday, stand in a bookstore doing a quick search to see what I have, and even more important, what I don’t have. Which enabled me to make good buying decisions to fill in some gaps in the library. I can look at fun graphs and charts which Library Thing creates from my personal collections.
If you’re very curious, you can check out my library catalog here, keeping in mind I haven’t necessarily been concerned about accessioning the correct edition of every book. Because so many of my books predate barcodes, or even ISBNs, I had to do a lot of manual entry. There’s a reason this project took six months to complete! I’ve chosen to keep my library publicly accessible, but you can make your collection private if you so choose and want to use this tool for organization.
If six months seems daunting, well, I figured if I didn’t start I’d never finish. Some days I’d just add a shelf at a time. Others I’d spend a couple of hours doing entry. My priority were the non-fiction collections as I use those for the research on a regular basis and needed to be able to search them. So those got added quickly and early. Fiction lagged for a long time as I generally read fiction in ebook. Today, though, it’s all in there. You see, I had a moment at the bookstore yesterday, when I found the dollar shelf of pulp science fiction books…
Since I had to accession all of those, I might as well get the last five shelves of fiction into the catalog while I was at it. Ok, it was eight shelves. Took about two hours. Worth it!
The duplicate buying problem is so real. I've walked out of used bookstores with the same Asimov collection like three times before I startedtracking mine. The research angle is underrated too, being able to tag books by topic means you dont spend an hour remembering which shelf has that one reference you need.
I'm in the process of getting rid of many items, and the library was next on my list. Therefore, Library Thing is something I could really use! Unfortunately, it appears neither my iphone nor my iPad remember my password, and I don't remember it either, so I can't install it from the App store.
I thought my devices were supposed to remember the dadgummed passwords, or at least give the option of using a fingerprint. Well, evidently not. Now I have to steel myself up to resetting the passwords to something else I'm not going to remember.
Anyway, THANK YOU for the theoretically potentially future projected helpful advice...