About 3 weeks ago I embarked on an adventure to catalog my home library so I could keep
a better track of what I actually had and was loaning. I had previously been organising
this by having a shelf in Goodreads which worked to an extent but it felt like more of a
stopgap rather than a sustainable solution long term.
The main improvements I wanted to see in this solution were:
1. Ease of inputting new books
2. Intuitive searching within the catalog
3. Being able to add books without ISBNs
Luckily for me I was about to see a
YouTube video
that would solve all my issues and spark me to finally make the switch. Fortunately my
collection was nowhere near as large as his 1800 books, but seeing him use a barcode
scanner to add books immediately made me realise that adding all of mine would be far
less of a pain than I had previously thought. My luck had not stopped however, because
for no discernable reason I actually already had a barcode scanner in my drawer, so it
was off to the races.
The first step was to take them all off the shelf, which proved trickier than I could
have imagined, as I'd stacked them like a jenga tower, but once they were on the bed I
started scanning away like there was no tomorrow! During that I also decided to put them
back in a more logical order, to make finding them easier online and in person. I
considered alphabetical by surname, which I used throughout childhood, but I was an
adult now so I made the choice to sort them by genre instead. At last I had scanned all
the books I could, and had about 95, however there were still a few that I had issues
with, mostly papers and textbooks without ISBNs. These required more work to note down
important information so that I could add them manually to the catalog, which libib
actually let me do (unlike Goodreads who makes you pass a test to add a book) so with
that I had all the books in my library.
The final count ended up being exactly 100, which was a lot larger than I had thought,
and you can see what they are
here