Cataloguing Your Library
Date Posted: April 30th, 2009
After a few years of collecting books, movies, and CDs it can get a bit difficult to keep track of what you have. Eventually you’ll find yourself browsing the bookshop, looking at one of your favourite books only to realize you aren’t sure if you already own it. And if you move in with another book lover, such things get even more difficult. You may know what you have, but chances are you won’t know what stuff your Significant Other has. Do you really need two copies of Lord of the Rings?
To solve this problem, six months ago Aaron and I catalogued our combined books, DVDs, CDs, and video games. We were moving at the time, so we had to uproot all of our stuff anyway. As of today our system still works, and is almost effortless to maintain. In this post I’ll share with you how we keep track of all our books and digital media.
Cataloguing The Books
To catalogue our books we use an online service called LibraryThing, and, let me tell you, it is an excellent tool. Signing up for the service is simple, and once you have your profile, adding books to your personal library catalogue is just as easy. Just type in the ISBN (or title or author or library of congress number) and search from a wide variety of book databases. I was able to find the vast majority of books in our library almost instantly. Once you find your book, just click on the title and the book will get added to your library. LibraryThing also lets you know if you’ve already entered that book in your library. Very useful when you’re adding a bunch of books. You’ll quickly find which books you have two copies of!
On the off chance that your book isn’t in some book database (and I have a handful that aren’t), it’s pretty easy to make a new entry for the book. There are a lot of fields, but you don’t have to fill them all out.
Once you have books in your database, searching for books in your collection is just as painless as adding them. Just type the title of the book (or the author name) into the search box on your profile-page and the books in your library that match your search term will appear. As a rule, I’ve found searching by author gives the best results.
The cost of the service is really reasonable. With a free account you can add up to 200 books, and the lifetime membership with no book-limit is all of $25. The value/dollar ratio here is very high. The system is very intuitive and reliable. I highly, highly, highly recommend it.
If only there was a LibraryThing for digital media…
Cataloguing The Digital Media
Alas, LibraryThing does not have a direct way to catologue other media like DVDs, CDs, and Video games. (I’ve heard that it’s possible to add non-books to your collection, but the system isn’t intended for it.) So for this stuff we just used old-fashioned spreadsheets. Google Docs is our spread-sheet system of choice because we wanted to be able to edit the same document simultaneously and we wanted the ability to view the spreadsheet online. Google Docs does both of these things fairly well.
We have a separate spreadsheet for each type of Media: DVDs, CDs, and Video games. The reason for this is that there’s different information we want for different stuff. For instance, we only rip CDs, so while there’s no need to track whether or not a DVD has been ripped, it is nice to see this info for the CDs. I won’t say what fields we have for each type, because it’s really up to you. We don’t care about cataloguing things by genre, but maybe you do. I will suggest you add one specific field for every item you have, though: the UPC. It serves as an ISBN for non-books. Very useful if you want to quickly check the going price on your specific edition of whatever you have. You can search by UPC at almost any online retailer.
Stickers
The most important thing about maintaining a catalogue of your books is keeping it up-to-date. Once you’ve created the catalogue, you’ll probably feel confident that everything in your library is also in there for a few weeks, but after that you’ll start losing confidence. You’ll buy a new movie and forget to add it to the spreadsheet, or your SO will get a book and put it directly on the shelf with out adding to LibraryThing. It won’t take long for you to lose faith in the completeness of your catalogue, and as soon as that happens you’ll stop updating it. I mean, what’s the point? You’d have to recheck every book in order to make sure it’s there. That’s a lot of time, and isn’t a catalogue supposed to save you time?
The way we combat this problem is with stickers. For every book, DVD, CD, and Video game that’s been catalogued we put a small removable sticker on the back. That way we can quickly tell which item has been catologued and which one hasn’t. New stuff doesn’t get a sticker until it’s been catalogued. Once in a while we’ll forget to put a sticker on a book that’s been catalogued, but checking one book isn’t nearly as bad as checking every book. With this solution it’s very easy to feel confident that the books on the shelves are also in the database.
Of course, once in a while you’ll put a sticker on a book without cataloguing it, and unfortunately the system won’t catch that. Chances are it won’t happen that often though. If you’re worried about accumulating these errors you could do a check-up on your collection ever few years. Verifying won’t take nearly as long as entering everything in, and you can find out just how error prone you were. 
Maybe you’ll find that you didn’t have any errors!
If you decide to go with this system I’d suggest you keep extra stickers on hand, so that you can enter new items into the database and sticker them at any moment.
So that’s our system. It works very well for collections of things that don’t get used up (wouldn’t work very well for food, for instance), don’t get washed very often (stickers wouldn’t work well for silverware or clothing), and are easily distinguished (How do you tell apart 8 identical white socks?). At some point I’d like to expand this sort of system to other things, but I’m not sure how yet. If you have any ideas, let me know!
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