When we moved into our new home we decided it was time to add some organization to our gaggle of books. We set aside some space to get many of our books in the same room and give them some order. Teri wanted to organize by the Dewey Decimal system and, while I thought that was a bit much, I saw no reason not to do it.
As it turns out, we have over 500 books and probably near that many children's books. Finding all of those dewey numbers meant opening the cover of each one and hoping that the publisher's page had the number. If not, we could check Amazon or our library for a copy, and failing that maybe we'd make our own. For several hundred books, this would take a massive amount of time - especially with two early elementary children running around.
Along comes LibraryThing.com. Entering your book on LibraryThing is like adding it to your own personal card catalog which you can then search by title, author, or other data...and you can make your collection available for others to browse as well. There's a number of things other things you can do as well that we have yet to take advantage of like tagging, reviews, or rating your books.
LibraryThing uses the power of community to pull even more information about your books. You can access what others have said, participate in forums or meet others with similar libraries. Additionally, LibraryThing knows about book stores in your area.
Best of all, it's Free - with limitations. The free version is limited to 200 books, so we opted for the lifetime membership at $25.
While entering ISBNs could have been a pain, they also point you in the right direction to get a cheap barcode reader which made entry a cinch.
Getting all our books labeled and ordered became easy:
- Scan ISBNs into LibrayThing account (in multiples of 20)
- Export our catalog and import into Excel
- Check for missing call numbers our authors
- Mail Merge into Word
- Print using Avery 5428 Labels (20 labels per sheet)
- Apply in same order they were scanned
- Shelf books in order
The whole thing, including scanner, labels and account cost less than $45 and took only a few hours to accomplish. The hardest part was lugging the books up and down the steps and trying to keep everything on shelves so the kids could have the floor space for playing.
It seemed pretty "geeky" at first to set up a home library by dewey, but it is SO much easier to find the books that I'm looking for. I imagine that as time goes on, it will also save us money. In fact, in church today we were talking about a book and I pulled up our library on my phone to discover we had a copy on our shelves at home...that'll be handy in the bookstore.
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