Here’s an interesting tip from George Ure’s UrbanSurvival website. I own too many books, bought for reading rather than for investment, for this to be a practical thing for me to use, but some of you may find it invaluable.
Coping: Making Book
We were chatting yesterday about some of those book repositories around the net - and a thoughtful reader has some hints on managing the home library…
“….And speaking of books [Guttenberg, et all] are you aware there is a GREAT site where you can catalogue your own library very quickly and without a lot of typing?
The site is www.LibraryThing.com
If you open an acct [user name and password only] you can then plug in the ISBN — found on the back of cover or inside copyright page — into the search box and come up with the EXACT edition, type, year and publisher of every book you own. Important if there have been multiple editions of a title, because each unique version has its own individual ISBN. [International Standardized Book Number]
You can list 200 books for free or unlimited amt for $10, which is worth it when you have a library over 200 books!
The finished list can then be formatted in whatever style and with whatever amount of info you want. Mine is Author, Title, ISBN, Publication Data [edition, paper or hardbound, publisher and year]. You can even add a pix of the front cover to your list printout.
An accurate inventory is an absolute must for anyone with a valuable library, especially for insurance coverage! Easy to use — especially if you use the ISBN instead of doing an author or title search.
I’m printing out a hard copy then making a PDF version to burn onto a CD for safekeeping.”
Coming from a family where all of us kids had our first real jobs shelving books for the Seattle Public Library a few zillion years ago, my heavily booked sisters had interesting reactions. My younger sister said “Darn - it would have been great to know this BEFORE I did mine in Excel….” while my elder sister (the one with a Masters in Library Science) said “Actually I know of tiny public libraries that are using it.”