Cataloguing My Books

Yesterday, reader Phil LeDuc left me the following comment on my post about our ongoing library project:

The space-for-books problem is kind of like taxes (and death I guess), isn’t it? You can defer it for a while, but inexorably it gets you in the end. I’ve got the same situation.

On a related note Eric, have you catalogued your collection at all? Whether manually or using a software program or similar means?

It’s something I think I need to do for insurance and other purposes, and I’d be interested to hear from you and your readers on this subject. I’d like to find something that’s user-friendly and can produce reports that can be sorted by subject or title or author, and which then can be printed.

Thanks and good luck.

Thanks for writing Phil. The answer is that I have not catalogued my books to date. I usually operate from memory when buying books, which works reasonably well. I only buy duplicates once in a blue moon. However, your point about insurance is well-taken, and my books really should be better covered than what they are.

Susan actually came up with the idea of completely cataloguing our library, and Susan being Susan, she did a great deal of research while searching for an appropriate piece of software to use. She has a large collection of her own, so she has started with her books.

She located a piece of software called Bookpedia. Bookpedia has a lot of really useful functions. If you have a webcam attached to your computer (there’s one built into this laptop), you can use it to scan the barcode for the ISBN, and it then finds the book in its online database. It will store the book by genre, author, title–however you want it to catalogue them. She has found it very easy to use, and I commend it to you.

When she finishes her library, which will occur shortly, she has offered to start on mine. With a couple of thousand books in my library, it’s going to take a while. Also, I have a complete set of the reprints of the OR’s, all 128 volumes of them, and they obviously don’t have ISBN’s. The same goes for my first edition regimentals and some of the replica reprints that I’ve collected from Ward House Books. I’m not sure how we’re going to handle that, but we will figure it out.

Thanks for asking, Phil.