Home Library Management
29th December 2024
Before I was a writer, I was a reader. I was also, for a time somewhat congruent with becoming a writer fledgling, a librarian. I am now in possession of a small personal library, a modest collection after all these years and many moves have cost me more volumes than I care to think about.
I have tried, in the past, and at least once with the help of my enthusiastic teens, to create a library catalog of my own books. This isn’t as easy as it sounds – a video recently floated through my streams of a kid who was very excited to catalog his library by… scanning all his books. This only works, you know, if your books are young enough to have a barcode. Many of mine are older than ISBNs, let alone barcoding. Some of mine have ISBNs which were reassigned to other titles decades after their publication, which was interesting to discover when we were working on the library project. Still, somehow, I’d like to get an inventory of my books. For one thing, having that would hopefully keep me from acquiring too many duplicates. For another, it might help me find gaps in the library when I’m wandering about looking at books and wondering ‘do I really need this?’ and ‘have I already got three Greek cookbooks, do I need another?’ or even ‘ooh, Thriftbooks has a sale on!’
Know the feeling.