Books Do Furnish a Room

[pmcray]

Well, I've now got all my books on the shelves. Unfortunately, there are now in essentially random order. At some point, I'm going to have try and arrange them. I'd like to catalogue them too. Probably a little ambitious! Does anyone have any ideas how to organise my books.

I have got my PSII working. Unfortunately, at the moment, I am finding it extremely difficult to drive in a straight line in The Getaway. I suppose this is what comes of taking up videogames at the age of 34 rather than 3. I hope the learning curve is steep. I may buy a steering wheel. I've always wanted one.

Comments

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

Do you have a URL for Readerware - or any other source? I don't think it's what we'd want for a long-term back-end, but it might be handy for grabbing the info that we can then slurp into Notes.

[pmcray.livejournal.com]

The real question is how to classify my books. Do I adopt the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress systems. Are there other systems more suitable for small personal libraries? I guess that this problem must have been discussed on the web somewhere before now! I think knocking up a quick MySQL database is the easiest part of the problem.

[pmcray.livejournal.com]

But it seems from your experiences that Readerware is unable to find many books. I would guess that this is owing to different ISBNs being assigned to different editions of the same book. If a book is issued in hardback and paperback, the BL may well only hold the hardback, so there will no record of the paperback.

There are other classification sysatems. The London Library, for instance, uses its own one. The question is which is best system for a small (few thousand) volume library with definite biases to certain areas (sf, for instance). Of course, you're right, it's a lot easier to let the BL or LoC make the classsification decisdion, but it might not be optimal for my collection.