This is just one section of one of the bookshelves that we have in our home. You can see from this picture how we’ve tagged all of our books (like a library). Tagging and cataloging our books is my secret weapon.
We have thousands of books. There is no better way to know exactly where each of them belongs. Before organizing our books I couldn’t find them when I needed them, and John & I had unecessary duplicate copies of many of our books.
I know it’s geeky to do stuff like this. But I’m okay with that.
Oh, to have enough shelf space not to have to double shelve. *sigh*
And more seriously, when I get enough shelves so that I don’t have to double-shelve, I’ll be cataloging mine to. Guess that makes me geeky, too. 🙂
i have just as many books and at one point they were all organized by genre and then alphabetically but now they are scattered in shelves all over my house … its crazy that i can find anything as nothing is in any sort of order. i’ve been thinking about organizing them by colour because it looks kind of cool and then i can grab a red book when i’m feeling redish and green when i’m feeling greenish, lol ..
I’ve sort of been wishing that we went with color rather than LOC number for organizing. But now that it’s done this way I’m just not ready/willing to change! 🙂
I have a very visual memory for books–I can’t often remember the title but I can remember just what the cover and spine look like. Funny, eh?
Hi Jana, I was just visiting your site looking for your book cataloging system. I got a little bonus money and thought I’d treat myself to the scanner and software, since I also have more than 11 full bookshelves.
I’m so intrigued you would have gone with color rather than LOC for organizing. What do you mean by that? Color for major subject area LOC for in between?
Johnna:
You could add a field for spine color to the book database if you want.
The one thing I don’t like abt cataloging by LOC is that I used to take a rather wicked delight in putting books next to each other when the authors themselves were antogonists. Isn’t that weird of me? I am such a dork. But do keep me updated on your project–it took me months to do ours, but I didn’t have a scanner, I hand-coded in the ISBN numbers (can you say tedious?)