How to catalog my library
How I did it: I knew from the get go that I didn't want to catalog all my books by hand, so I started out with a table on Microsoft Word with columns for title, author, date of publication, number of pages, et cetera. The problem with that was that it was taking too long and I couldn't get all of the information I wanted without some exhaustive searching. So, I did a google search for cataloging websites and the first one I found was a perfect: librarything.com. Here's a link to my catalog: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/crawst
Lessons & tips:
- Use librarything.com. If you would rather use a word document or notecards then follow these tips:
- Know what information you want to catalog before you start, otherwise you'll end up trying to squeeze to much information into too little space.
- Develop a schedule. A lot of people try to do 5-10 books every day. I'm a student, so I found it easier to set aside an hour or two every Saturday and Sunday.
- But don't be uptight about your schedule, remember no one is staring over your shoulder making sure you get _____ amount of work done everyday.
- Be organized. For heaven's sake don't do something that I would do like catalog in different rooms so that you lose some of your notecards.
Resources: Librarything.com - They already have all the general information you could need plus reviews, and interesting memes and statistics that you can look at in the time you didn't spend copying out all those titles by hand.
