My Library
I’m working on cataloging my collection, as I do every so often. I have reached the point where I have a good idea if I have a book or not, but only a vague idea of where it is. My estimate is that there are about 2000 books in the collection, spread over six or seven bookshelves in a few different rooms.
They are totally unorganized except for a shelve dedicated solely to mass market paperbacks. It is a double stacked corner unit, good luck locating anything on it. Some other books have been arranged by my wife to suit her purposes. She has cherry picked some of the titles to put on shelves and those are the books she likes. Another few shelves have been arranged by color, which actually looks quite nice.
I have been using the Readerware program to organize my collection. It is a database program with the most notable feature of being pretty good at auto-cataloging from an ISBN. I have an old Cuecat scanner, and that makes short work of many of the recent titles.
Unfortunately, most books before the 80’s don’t have bar codes, and they don’t even have ISBNs before the 70’s. I have a number of books before the 40’s and they don’t have LCCN’s. That means that I have to manually enter those in the database, which can be pretty time consuming.
I chose Readerware because it seemed tolerable enough, and it worked on Macs, Windows and Linux. I’ve bounced between the platforms and something that was cross platform seemed like the way to go. If I was to make a fresh choice now, I would probably lean towards delicious library, as it seems to be very polished looking.
My chief problem with Readerware is that it won’t let me just haul off with a SQL statement when I want to. I know that I would probably just end up trashing the database doing something ill-advised, but that’s what backups are for, right? Also, it’s pretty ugly. I’ve gotten used to a certain level of glamour from applications on the mac, and Readerware is just not a pretty program.
It’s not bad, though, and I hope to continue with the cataloging on a regular basis. I figure a few weeks of dedicated scanning and data entry ought to do it.
August 8th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Greetings from Roanoke.
Only 2,000 books? What shocking deprivation. I feel moved to suggest several books (four, to be exact) that rocked my world for one reason or another.
Hart’s Hope, by Orson Scott Card…a really neat book, if you can find it, with an interesting sci-fi take on organized religion.
Pillars of The Earth, Ken Follet…but you probably have this already.
Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood…just brilliant (but be warned, it’s a total girl-book)
And, for something completely bizarre, Wraeththu, by Storm Constantine. You won’t really WANT to pick it up…but once you do, you won’t be able to put it down….