Your Home Library: The Complete System for Organizing, Locating, Referencing, and Maintaining...

Your Home Library: The Complete System for Organizing, Locating, Referencing, and Maintaining Your Book ... | Kathie Coblentz | Some Good Ideas But Not A Solution

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Your Home Library:...

	Your Home Library: The Complete System for Organizing, Locating, Referencing, and Maintaining Your Book ... Kathie Coblentz Running Press, 2003 - 96 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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For the general book lover, someone whose ardor for the printed word has led to stacks of yet-to-be-read volumes on floors and other surfaces, here's a great, enjoyable way to keep track of them all. This comprehensive kit draws upon the expertise of one of the world's greatest libraries, the only facility of its kind with both world-class research and circulating collections. It includes a CD containing custom software to organize and record your book collection by title, author, subject, location on your bookshelf, and numerous additional useful categories. Also included are beautiful bookplates, an instruction manual, and an instructive volume on creating and organizing home libraries, written by an experience librarian. The 96-page book celebrates the myriad of joys of being a book lover, and addresses such issues as evaluating and organizing a collection, and keeping it in place with bookends and shelves; caring for books, and the art of loaning books that are actually returned.

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Your Home Library Excellent Software

This product has specific fields for the entry of all essential data about a book but is still flexible enough to allow for the
entry of information specific to a personal library. I found
the ability to put the entire data base in alphabetical order
with one click of the mouse a great feature. The instruction manual is also excellent with lots of useful information and helpful hints. If you are looking to organize a personal library its hard to imagine a better system exists anywhere.

Some Good Ideas But Not A Solution

According to a recent New York Times article, Kathie Coblentz has a home library she estimates at 3,600 volumes packed into a one-bedroom apartment. As a special collection cataloger for the New York Public Library she has written the book portion of this set (software, book, and binder).

Book cataloging software is an iffy proposition. My current collection (20,000+ volumes not counting 1,000+ of graphic novels) is on a computerized database. I tried many off-the shelf products and they all fail in one major aspect or another. Do you want to know what stories are in a particular collection? Do you want to know that the book crosses several genres? (a big thing in romances these days) Do you want ISBNs? searches capable of looking for primary, secondary, tertiary, etc. authors? M. Ahrens suggests software that adds data based on ISBN. But what about all of those books published before the ISBN became a standard in 1970? Value? Edition? Typeface? Binding? A collector is better off thinking about what they want to track in their collection and using a simple database program (Paradox, Access, etc.) or a configurable home inventory program.

The binder is designed for printing out a copy of your book inventory (mine changes several times a week thus making a paper record short-lived and wasteful). It is a nice addition for a complete collection (say a complete collection of first editions of a favorite author) but inadequate for any active collection.

The book is interesting but seems to apply to a perfect world. If you add to your collection, the idea of shelf numbering may not be something you want to have to keep updating in the database as books move from one shelf to another. Calculating shelf space needed is usually pretty straight forward (but always add at least 30% if you don't want to spend more time moving books than reading them.

Of course there are nuggets that cataloging novices may not have thought of and the price is not prohibitive but if you are looking for that final solution to your personal library, this is really just a signpost that can point you into better directions.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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