Before I was a writer, I was a reader. I was also, for a time somewhat congruent with becoming a writer fledgling, a librarian. I am now in possession of a small personal library, a modest collection after all these years and many moves have cost me more volumes than I care to think about.
I have tried, in the past, and at least once with the help of my enthusiastic teens, to create a library catalog of my own books. This isn’t as easy as it sounds – a video recently floated through my streams of a kid who was very excited to catalog his library by… scanning all his books. This only works, you know, if your books are young enough to have a barcode. Many of mine are older than ISBNs, let alone barcoding. Some of mine have ISBNs which were reassigned to other titles decades after their publication, which was interesting to discover when we were working on the library project. Still, somehow, I’d like to get an inventory of my books. For one thing, having that would hopefully keep me from acquiring too many duplicates. For another, it might help me find gaps in the library when I’m wandering about looking at books and wondering ‘do I really need this?’ and ‘have I already got three Greek cookbooks, do I need another?’ or even ‘ooh, Thriftbooks has a sale on!’
Plus, as my husband and I discussed earlier this week, after a friend suffered a house fire, there are books in my collection that might be impossible to replace if they were destroyed. Not simply because they are antique, but because I can’t remember their title. I was looking for a book where I’d read about the penalty for counterfeit saffron being death, and couldn’t find it for the life of me in my own library. I did find the original reference online, so I cited that, but I was frustrated with myself for having vivid recollections of the contents of the book, not so much the title. I don’t have time to do this, but I also think I can’t leave it aside as a lost cause. It will be a very useful tool. I just need to take it on a little at a time.
There are likely apps for this, but I suspect they rely on being able to scan barcodes or enter ISBNs. I’m going to try using Koha, which is a free library management system we used at the tiny public library where I worked once upon a time. I don’t need to manage checking books out and in again (although we joke that I’m developing the library for the North Texas Troublemakers). Just knowing what I have, being able to weed the collection, and find things when I want them will help!
I have a large online library as well, but that’s different. For one, it is ephemeral. Just as music collections have progressed from vinyl to 8-track to cassette to CD to MP3 to streaming, we can’t count on our ebooks to always be accessible. Converting thousands of books to a new format with every change is a daunting task, and one few will undertake. The Internet Archive, which is where many books are availble online, recently went down due to hacking (if I understood that correctly) and was down for some time. A cookbook historian I know was very upset about it, as she uploads public domain and often very rare books there for others to be able to see and use. I don’t think she’s alone in using a cloud service for holding massive research archives. This is a vulnerable point, just as the shelves of books lining my house are vulnerable to a fire. The Library of Alexandria may be in part or whole apocryphal, but the point remains that books are precious resources that can disappear (and have) leaving only ghosts of quotes in other works to bear witness to their existence.
I don’t know what the answer is. I just know that my little library is part of a vast information network that holds the knowledge of humanity. My role as its custodian is to preserve it, to disseminate where I can, and to use it or pass books on to those who need them. These past few years I’ve become aware that print books are worth holding onto, as ebooks are too easily changed or lost. Hence my growing collection of pulps, children’s books, and cookbooks. Makes sense to me, anyway. One shelf at a time, that’s how to manage it!
Mad Genius Club 
6 responses to “Home Library Management”
I don’t know anyone socially with a larger pile of books than my husband & me. We were delighted when we were able to purchase a used library’s 100 6-shelf metal bookcases to add to our 50 or so wooden bookcases, but then we acquired a (family friend) political movement participant’s professional library (these are all long stories), and that was the last straw.
Since our dwellings dwindled in size as our print horde multiplied (it wasn’t supposed to be that way), I look around our final location (an 1812 cabin with a plumbing/heating addition) in long-accustomed despair. The valuable books (sporting collections, etc.) are housed (cabined?), and our very necessary (can’t do without) core references and random recent acquisitions are acquiring dust on shelving/in corners, but all the rest (along with their institutional bookcases) are sleeping in storage in boxes (along with the excess furniture, etc.)
This a burden at this point, not the source of a warm glow. While Umberto Eco has a point, and all would have been well if we’d been able to level up to a much larger final dwelling, that didn’t work out and is unlikely to change.
The sporting books will have to eventually be put up for auction (a lot of work), and the rest will molder in some fashion (libraries/used book stores no longer seek out a high volume of print books, and we have no heirs to burden.) [If you’re aware of any appropriate destinations, do please let me know.]
The one bright light is ebooks for general use, esp. fiction. I acquire most of them permanently, one way or another and store them in lowest common denominator filetypes (e.g., MOBI), so as long as I have backed up computers and enough brains to use them, they take up effectively no space, and will last me until my final ereader drops from my nerveless fingers or I forget what the squiggles mean.
Print is still the only useful medium for illustrated work (and general “lovely to have” material), but I have looked into library technology for private collections and have never been wishful-thinking enough to believe I would ever make that solo effort and maintain it. That won’t change now.
At least for ebooks, record keeping/lookup is a much more trivial exercise. And there’s some hope of keeping myself entertained for long enough even if I eventually become institutionalized.
I need shelves…. *Wry G*
We still have a set of Encyclopedia Britannica (Things change…) And the Great Books of the Western World. We have hubby’s Law Books, and my Art, Writing and Cosmetology books and magazines. Most of the homeschool books have gone to kids or people who need them. Many of the Sci-fi/Fantasy books have gone to kids who wanted them, a few to used book stores. Much of the rest we have kept. We also have church and other history books, some language books. Thanks that we “think” we might read again, or need if the collapse of civilization comes and we need to rebuild learning from the ashes…(A wishful hope/thought, much like colonizing in Alpha Centauri) I do have a lot of ebooks – I don’t generally read them, as I don’t like reading from a tablet/ereader, and if I’m on the computer, I have other things to do. We used to alphabetize all our books everytime we moved…Now we don’t have the shelves or the space to do that. One of my goals is to have a house with a dedicated library room.
I wrote Library of Congress numbers into all our nonfiction, and shelved it in the order indicated. Fiction is alpha by author. Graphic novels are alpha by title, because the same title may have a succession of new authors. Treating them all alike would truly be a foolish consistency.
The RedQuarters library is roughly sorted by topic, with international travel, science, and history in one room, theology in the den (overflows to the spare bed room) history and culture in the spare room, foreign language books on three shelves and a stack in my room and office, research books in my office, and art books on flat spaces all over the place. Mom’s fiction takes up part of her side of the room, Dad’s nonfiction and westerns take up the other side. The only rooms without dedicated book shelves are the bathrooms, living room (art books stacked on end tables) and the closet with the hot water heater. The utility room has shelves for cookbooks.
Moving had an opportunity to cull the physical book collection, so it now fits entirely on shelves (or close to it). And I kept a catalog of books starting when there were a lot fewer of them (my book catalog is the oldest file on my system — it started out as a file on punch charges, and kept changing media/format/etc since the 60s) — so it was easier to let it stay current, since I only had to add books as I got them, rather than having to start cataloging the whole library.
Ebooks are self-cataloging. And I don’t buy ebooks with DRM that I can’t easily ignore. Which means the books are all backed up multiple times (a half dozen data sticks, plus the computers and tablets all have copies).
So far, Calibre had proven capable of converting books from whatever their original format was to whatever new format I want to keep them in. I hope that continues (or, if not, that a new equivalent comes out). Because changing format/media is the big threat to any digital record — and ebooks certainly fall into that category.