You may have noticed that I have a mania for organizing. In fact that’s probably why I enjoy working with computers and databases.
I also read – a lot. I may have mentioned that I have my books organized in Library of Congress classification order – PS for fiction, G151 for travel, RA64 for viruses and epidemiology, QA76 and TK5105 for computers, etc. (Though at the moment most of them are in boxes in an unrelated organizational frenzy – the ones that aren’t in my giant next-to-the-bed bookshelf of current reads.)
I used to keep a list of books in Excel (in fact I used to keep a lot of lists in Excel, but I’m trying to get that monkey off my back – that’s another story). Then for a while I had a php/mysql web database, but that didn’t really work out so well because I still had to look up and manually enter all the information any time I got a new book, and I had to write all the input/output – good practice for me, but less good for keeping up-to-data.
But recently I started using Booxter – an OSX application that keeps a database of my books. The really cool thing about Booxter, is that it’ll take the ISBN (which is shown on the barcode or inside title page of most recent books) and look up all the book information. I don’t even know where it looks it up; but it comes back with title, author, and even my beloved LOCIS listing. Not only that, but it often brings back a picture of the books’ cover!
So far I’ve got about 300 books listed – the ones that had ISBNs in my excel spreadsheet, and the ones that were lying around the house not in boxes (as well as those for a box of books I gave away – now marked number of copies 0!). I imagine I have about 200 more books that either I didn’t note the ISBN the first time, or didn’t add them to the Excel sheet at all; when I break them back out I’ll probably address that, and find the labelmaker and add LOC stickers to the new books, and I’ll be ready to file them. Still a little puzzled how to file books that don’t have a LOC class; do I just guess or do I order them by name or arbitrarily? These are the issues that drive an order freak like me, mad. At least I hope that’s what’s driving me mad.