On the subject of dealing with huge piles of books - I'm a big fan of Alexandria Book Collection Manager on my laptop.
Its free
It is very intuitive and user friendly
You can enter the info about your book collection by either importing a document/spreadsheet or by typing in author surname or title keyword(s)
- it then finds full title, author details, publisher, ISBN etc and also downloads a little thumbnail of the cover (the default image is the original hardback cover, for you lovers of first editions).
It is yet to fail me in terms of finding a book and cover image, but you can enter the book details manually and a scanned image of the cover if needs be.
You can also have sub folders and tags to organise things properly (one of the default folders it comes with is 'books out on loan', as if any real bibliophile would need such a category..)
It also comes with an 'owned' subfolder; 'borrowed'; 'read' and 'favorite' (its from the US of A). It also comes with a 'wishlist' folder that you can send to other people as a hint for that special present.
And each book entry comes with a 'notes' page where you can record your thoughts about the book, copy links to interesting websites etc. (And you can rate the book out of five stars).
And it is only available on Linux for us craftsmen that are still tending the flame of Hepatitus (or whatever his name is..)
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Sadly where I work the IT dept think Linux is a character in "Peanuts" so I'm a LibraryThing user. Free if you catalogue less than a hundred books but otherwise you pay ( a donation! ). It does more or less the same thing but also shows similar libraries and recommends books ( although I've never taken one up ).
ReplyDeleteIt'd be interesting to discover the motivation for cataloguing. It's fairly obvious for an academic but less clear for someone like me. I'll "fess-up" to narcissism ( before anyone hurls the accusation ).