I love having a catalogue of my books! After many years of false starts and self-written database applications that foundered on the sheer tedium of data entry, I'm now using Readerware. It derives catalogue records from places like the BL, LC, and amazon, based on the ISBN - which can be scanned in from the barcode. If it gets the record from amazon, it also stores the image of the cover!!
I love reading about other people's shelving habits! (Sad, I know.) I shelve my books by category (non-fiction, broken down into a vague ordering of subjects known only to myself; fiction - interpreted very broadly to include other serious writing such as essays, too; poetry). Within fiction and poetry, I order by author and then usually either title or series chronology. My catch-all 'fiction' category was the result of a whole world of pain over things like kinds of fiction (e.g. should there be a separate SF/fantasy section); language (should I have all foreign-language texts elsewhere, but if so, what about translations); authors who cross categories between fiction and other things (e.g. off the top of my head, Umberto Eco, or Virginia Woolf). Then there are other oddities, like the 'Encyclopedia Sherlockiana', which it really only makes sense to shelve alongside the Sherlock Holmes books themselves... Basically, though I try not to admit it even to myself, my shelving is a nightmare of random inconsistency. But I know where things are. Er, usually.
The greatest tragedy for my shelving at the moment is that I've run out of shelf space. Boooo!
Speaking of shelving by colour, have you ever seen the New England School of Law library's 'search by colour' page? No, really: they have a couple of thousand titles indexed by colour. (I love the page name, too. Exactly what the students come in and say....)
Ahem. Sorry this is so long. I think I got carried away...
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-03-07 02:12 pm (UTC)I love reading about other people's shelving habits! (Sad, I know.) I shelve my books by category (non-fiction, broken down into a vague ordering of subjects known only to myself; fiction - interpreted very broadly to include other serious writing such as essays, too; poetry). Within fiction and poetry, I order by author and then usually either title or series chronology. My catch-all 'fiction' category was the result of a whole world of pain over things like kinds of fiction (e.g. should there be a separate SF/fantasy section); language (should I have all foreign-language texts elsewhere, but if so, what about translations); authors who cross categories between fiction and other things (e.g. off the top of my head, Umberto Eco, or Virginia Woolf). Then there are other oddities, like the 'Encyclopedia Sherlockiana', which it really only makes sense to shelve alongside the Sherlock Holmes books themselves... Basically, though I try not to admit it even to myself, my shelving is a nightmare of random inconsistency. But I know where things are. Er, usually.
The greatest tragedy for my shelving at the moment is that I've run out of shelf space. Boooo!
Speaking of shelving by colour, have you ever seen the New England School of Law library's 'search by colour' page? No, really: they have a couple of thousand titles indexed by colour. (I love the page name, too. Exactly what the students come in and say....)
Ahem. Sorry this is so long. I think I got carried away...