Cataloguing books...

[fajrdrako]

Dec. 13 2007: Do you use any of the online book-cataloguing sites, like Library Thing or Shelfari? Why or why not? [Or . . . do you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking to?? (grin)]

If not an online catalog, do you use any other method to catalog your book collection? Excel spreadsheets, index cards, a notebook, anything?

Yes, I catalogue my books. I don't catalogue my books obsessively. Or methodically. Or consistently. I catalogue them on a casual basis. Occasionally. When I feel the urge to dust and I think, "I've got books I never catalogued, don't I?"

I don't use Shelfari. I joined Shelfari. I keep getting perky, friendly messages from them telling me that my friends also own The Lord of the Rings (I know) and the Dunnett novels (yes, I know). Mostly I ignore Shelfari. It looks too... colourful. Too complicated. Makes me feel lazy. I'd rather be reading than cataloguing, anyway.

To catalogue my books, I use MS Excel and I type in all titles and authors when I find the time. Sometimes also publication dates, when I feel excessively inspired. I started with the fiction. I don't think my non-fiction colection has ever entirely been catalogued. I like to think I mostly know what I have, and I mostly know where it is, and that might be stretching the definition of "mostly" but it seems to... mostly... work. There isn't a lot of rhyme or reason to it. Dunnett novels in one place, favourite hardcovers in another, biographies of English Romantic poets on a certain shelf, biographies of Julius Caesar in another... It isn't elegant, but I cope.

I'm not even going to start to talk about the question of whether I catalogue my comic books.

Comments

[beccaelizabeth]

I use LibraryThing and a CueCat scanner. I think it's called that anyway, it's a little cat thing that reads the barcodes. LibraryThing then turns that into a complete listing. It's awesome.

Books with no barcode are in a big heap on another shelf. Actually I'm thinking of giving them away. Er, not only because they're more of a bother to catalog. I mostly haven't read them either. Inherited books. But then I get to thinking that some of them might be treasures, so on my shelf they stay.

I like LibraryThing, it remembers stuff for me. I can look up how many of a series I've got, or if an author sounds familiar cause somewhere in the house there's books by them. For a while I stopped buying books that weren't new releases, on account of I had no idea if I owned them already. No longer that particular problem.

My comics... I had a full list of them, done with a typewriter, very carefully. Not carefully enough though - I checked it once I thought I'd completed my Justice League collection and I had some doubles and some gaps rather than a complete run. Woe.

Of course any comics you can buy on amazon, the collected ones, they scan in just like smaller books. Win.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I love those books that are comic book collections, or TPBs, or "Bookshelf Format". I wish I could afford more of them. If I had the patience to wait till my favourite series had finished story arcs, I could, but no, usually I'm really, really impatient....

[duncanmac.livejournal.com]

I've considered joining LibraryThing (I only found out about it recently) but I just don't think I have the time to justify doing so. I already treat Facebook much the same way as you do Shelfari. :-/

As for comic and other books, I'm perfectly willing to come over some day (almost certainly Thursday or Friday evening) and work on a catalog for same. [I was hoping I could get my schedule changed at work, but that has decidedly failed. Sigh. :-(]

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I just don't think I have the time to justify doing so

That's part of it - I have better uses for my time than book cataloguing, except for those times I think it's fun.

I'm also not sure I want to be the kind of person who has all her books catalogued properly. It isn't that I don't admire those people, I do. And I envy them. But I don't want to be one of them.

Cataloguing my comic books... would take a little more than a day.

Sorry to hear about your work schedule.

[takhys]

I've got an account with GoodReads, and I've found them to be pretty darn good. You can adjust your email settings so you don't get an update whenever a friend of yours reads a new book, or you can have it set to do a weekly/monthly update.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I don't know that one. I must check it out.

[takhys]

I like LibraryThing and have an old account with them, but I found the interface of GoodReads to be more intuitive.

Ta-Dah.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Okay! Thanks for the link.

[takhys]

No prob. They also have a feature that lets you import all your books from an Excel spreadsheet.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

That would be so easy to do!

[takhys]

Yep, yep. Most of the online ones let you do that - so if you find that you dislike one service and want to switch to another, it's pretty easy to do that.

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

I ought to, but I'm too casual about re-shelving for it to be worthwhile. It only goes by shelves.

Main shelves in living room, anticlockwise, bottom to top:

Asterix etc
Four shelves of language books
Late Antiquity
Late Antiquity
Late Antiquity
Really, really tall books
Osteology and some archaeology
Nutter Books
Herbals etc

Other shelves in living room, top to bottom:
Biographies et
Linguistics and some mythology
Other archaeology
Big archaeology books
More archaeology, Sandman and Tardi

Upstairs: Back bedroom (where I sleep): fiction
Front bedroom: er... everything else. Six book cases of it.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I like your shelving technigues. I try (or have tried) to do something similar. For example:

Shelves by front door - cookbooks on top, poetry under that, borrowed books under that, with oversized books on the bottom and games in between. The Asterix books are there, along with the humungous and luxurious X-Men illustrated history that DK books put out, and the gorgeous book about Batman.

Beside the kitchen door: on top, Esperanto and Chaucer (because he won't fit with the other poetry books); second and third shelves, history and biography; then graphic novels (mostly Neil Gaiman and Legion of Super-Heroes hardcovers), and on the bottom, binders and books about media (e.g., Horatio Hornblower picture books).

Beside the bathroom door: a shelf of Latin and then general dictionaries (various langauges, A Dictionary of Angels and so on), reference works, computer books, books on autism, philosophy, yoga, Doctor Who videotapes - I don't know how they got there, but they did, and it's easy to remember them there! And on the bottom shelf, library books. (Those which don't fit go on top, on top of the Latin books.)

In the bedroom: fiction paperbacks and misc. fiction and unread things that don't fit elsewhere.

I have a new bookcase in the living room and so far it has 'stuff from the boxes in the locker' which I cleared out just before Christmas - odds and ends, I've no idea what.