Today I was thinking, when Samuel and I are rich and have our own library 
, how will we arrange the books?
This has always been a problem to me. I don’t want to have a ridiculously complex number system that will require a catalogue, at least I think I don’t. But what is a better way?
Organizing by author’s last name is problematic because sometimes it is helpful to have books arranged by subject. But then organizing by subject makes it difficult to find all of an author’s books. Then, do I want to separate non-fiction from fiction? What about when non-fiction relates to fiction, like grouping actual Arthurian Romances with fictional books about Camelot? And is poetry fiction or non-fiction, or something else? Also, there is the problem of Odd-Sized Books and Old Books. Sometimes Tall Books or Long Books don’t fit on the shelf properly, so you can’t put them in the section they are assigned to, while Tiny Books might slip into the back of the shelf and be lost forever. Old Books I personally find necessary to shelve together, because they look so pretty like that.
And all this doesn’t even consider our Large and Growing DVD Collection. Do you arrange them by title, date, director, subject, type???
Or the guy in a movie I heard about who arranged his massive record collection autobiographically: in order of when he’d purchased and listened to them.
I guess maybe I just need a card catalogue. They do look cool, as furniture. Or maybe I need a computer program. Does anyone know of a free computer program for cataloging books?
Currently our library is loosely arranged in these catagories:
Tall Books, and Massive Box Sets
Old Books
Children’s Books, and Books that Look Like Children’s Books
Fiction, sort of by author
Non-Fiction, sort of by subject
and DVDs:
Misc.
Swashbucklers
Noir
Disney
Jim Henson
George Lucas
Superheroes
Musicals
Non-Disney Cartoons
Lord of the Rings
Japanese
Other Foreign
TV Shows
Music (i.e. Help!)
I organized our extensive books a couple of ways. I did our non fiction by two ways; chronological and subject. Avram and I have a lot of historical books, starting from the ancient times, so I start from ancient Egypt and move all the way through to modern times. The rest of our non fiction I do by subject, like church books, or language books. I also keep the huge sets by one author together; Will Durant, Hugh Nibley (these each take up an entire shelf). For the fiction I do it also by chronology, since I like a lot of historical books; I also keep it by author, so all of Dicken’s books are together, although they weren’t all published at the same time. I go by the publishing date of the first book by that author to determine place. Although for my medieval and older I just generally judge the location, and it’s not exact. For my paperbacks I keep them on my children’s bookcase (we had five bookcases in Provo), and they are usually all modern books, so they don’t really have any organization, although I keep them grouped by author (but not in any order). I too have a good looking book shelf, which are their own group of handsome, old books.
Then finally role-playing books are by system. (Avram says they take up a lot more shelf space then they merit).
Basically what I’m saying is that I have a massively complex system for shelving, but it works really well for us; if I want a fiction book from the Victorian times, I just look in that section. If I want to read a book on Napoleon, I go to that time period of the historical non fiction books.
I also do our DVDs by subject, basically like yours. Avram’s parents do their’s alphabetical by title, but they have a ton, so it would hard to keep track of by subject.
I guess the important thing is if you think of books naturally by subject or by author. I never remember authors, so I’d have a hard time thinking of that. And I love browsing by subject. But Author/title does make more sense in an absolute way. I want to have a library too, someday.
http://www.librarysupportstaff.com/4automate.html
Provides some resources for cataloging a library some which are free. In general though I would just recommend you organize them yourself and remember where you put them. I realize it would be wonderful to have a huge library and catologue it but believe me the process of entering the data about all your books into a database is not as rewarding as it may seem.
If you want to snag a system I would use the Library of Congress numbering and divide it that way as it does topics and authors. I wouldn’t worry about cataloging separately by author as very few authors really transcend literary genres. You won’t have tolkien in the science section.
Anyway you can also use excel to catalog as well but it can be a head ache. I recomend if you have a huge library and are rich that you
1. Buy a cataloging program you can probably afford it
2. Hire someone to catalog your library for you
3. Consider donating your books to a public library to share the wonder of literacy. Remember many people don’t read because they don’t think there is a book for them out there. And books are so expensive for libraries to buy.
hmm, I agree with you two, the best thing would be to sort them in the way that I would think to look for them, or just know my library so well that I know where everything is.
I did find http://www.librarything.com/ which is a pretty darn cool system. You don’t have to type everything in; it links itself to Amazon.com and fills in all the info. However, the problems are that Amazon doesn’t always have the edition I have, so the catalogue wouldn’t actually be accurate, and also, you have to pay $25 to use this program for more than 200 books, and right now I am stingy.
Unclutterer has done some posts about books. They’re worth reading. They suggest some programs you can use to catalog books, but I would probably just use an Excel spreadsheet or a MySQL database or something.
I always thought it would be cool to arrange books in my future home by reader age. Books for toddlers on the lowest shelves, Children’s fiction slightly higher, etc. And group them by subject, or author, or whatever just feels right. And catalogue them on the computer so you know exactly what you have and know where it is. Or just not worry about it. I guess it depends on how many books you have.
Hhhmmmm, maybe we should get rich first, and worry about this later, eh?
I just finished doing my DVDs. Since I don’t have a database program handy, I’ve listed just the names. I may get ambitious one day and add other fields, but for right now, I’m doing good just to have them listed in vaguely alphabetical order. The exception are “series” movies, like Star Wars, Star Trek, James Bond, etc. The sort function on the spreadsheet allows me to type any new offerings, tell it to “sort ascending,” then it puts the new title or titles in alphabetical order. It’s crude, but by laying out the DVDs according to the list, it gives me a rough idea where things are. Trust me — it’s an improvement over just shoving the things on the shelf wherever there’s room.
Uh, the second sentence was supposed to read “Since I don’t have a database program handy, I’ve just listed the names on a spreadsheet. Sorry — must be tired or something…
You should organize them by intuition.
I tried to catalogue my books by means of an Access database, but then I got bored and quit. I already have too many books. I have my basically organized by subject (since I don’t have a lot of fiction- that’s Anthony’s realm). However, I was given a great memory for locating objects (probably the reason why my job for the last 4 years has been in a library) so I can generally recall where books are in my home as long as I was the one that put them there. I get really angry when Anthony tries to “help” me by putting books away, because then I really have to go searching for them. It also helps that my books are grouped together in my many bookcases. (I do separate fiction from non-fiction, and I had to pull shorter books for a new bookcase I got that had narrow shelves. I figure it’s my library- closed stacks- I can do whatever is best for me.) Since I’m heading off to library school next year, I have been reading up on cataloging and it’s a lot more subjective than I originally thought. Basically, it is up to the cataloger to try to figure out the subject heading, and if a book can fit into more than one category than it is best to go with the one that would be searched more (ther are a lot, a lot, a lot of rules though; not nearly as simple as I make it to be). A lot of libraries are getting rid of their physical card cataloges, so it probably is possible to buy one from somewhere.
Maybe you should burn all of your books and archive them all digitally! Haha… ummmm. Nevermind.
We use LibraryThing, which you mentioned, for two reasons. First, it deals with German books well; and second, at the time I started, it was the only social cataloging web application that could export your list to a spreadsheet.
I understand that Shelfari (which is free) will now export to a spreadsheet, and possibly GoodReads (also free) will also. I happen to like the LibraryThing interface (and I’ve already paid and entered our books), so I’ll be staying there.
I’ve seen some people include DVDs and/or CDs in their online library. Other people tag a book or disk with its location in their house.
As far as the physical cataloging, we’re still separated by his and her books for the most part, but here’s the general run down:
Fiction (by author)
Non-Fiction (by subject)
German (by fiction and non-fiction)
Comics/Graphic Novels/RPGs (no known order)
Children’s books (lowest shelf)
DVDs (by title – although director would be cool)
i’m ocd, i organize my books by height…from tallest to shortest. that way in my bizarre world, they’re aesthetically pleasing, and it’s completely nonsensical to find.