Book cataloging

So a lot of this weekend has revolved around Cataloging Our Library.

That was the plan, it's turned out more to be cataloging significant portions of our library.

kd5mdk and jazz007 came up very late Friday night, and then we stayed up entirely too late after that chatting with them. Saturday morning after breakfast I picked up sandy_tyra, Rhiannon, and Shawn. We started out at it, starting with the paperback fiction, which got scanned, uploaded, checked, stickered with a star, alphabetized, and put on the shelves. More than 1000 paperback fiction books, not counting the "problem children", the ones without ISBNs or LoC numbers. There's rather a lot of those, as selenite inherited a lot of OLD sf from his father. We finished by about dinnertime, and were tired. Gerry Tyra came over, and the evening mostly shifted to computer stuff.

This morning after brunch, since kd5mdk and jazz007 were still here and still willing, we tackled the hardback fiction. We got an even higher percentage of problem children, but all the ones that could go in by scanning or isbns are in. Total so far in the database is 1272.

We'll have to tackle the nonfiction a bit at a time, and slowly go through and manually enter all the problem children. And then get upstairs for the kids' books, my crafts books, my midwifery books, etc. This will take a while. But we've made a good start, thanks to our friends coming and helping.

PICTURES! From today - I should have gotten some of the Tyras yesterday, but I didn't.

Further thoughts on librarying

selenite ended up bringing down the Ikea bookshelf that was in Brendan's room, and put it diagonally across the window in the north library. That gives us enough room to get all the fiction, hardback and paperback, and his gaming books into the north library. The south library will be nonfiction, oversized, and the music room.

We need to get a bigger house to have room for more books!

Wait a minute, isn't that just what we did 2 years ago in moving to Texas? Yeek.

Trouble is, they don't build houses with rooms suitable for libraries. We've done pretty well with combining what is officially the living room and the dining room, but still. We could rearrange my study some, get rid of the half-height bookcase, and put in several Ivar units up there, but that really divides the library, craft books up there is logical but what else do we move up there?

I suppose we ought to start culling - really, do we need *three* copies of Heinlein's Expanded Universe on the shelf? - but selenite just doesn't work that way. And it wouldn't be good in the long run. We do have some more room right now, it's not urgent yet.

Goodness, just imagine all the extra books we'll be adding in as the kids get older and homeschooling grows.

Looking at the number of paperback fiction books, and the number of bookcases they take up, as compared to the number of hardback fiction and the shelves THEY take up, I am really feeling that we need to seriously resolve to WAIT for paperback for almost all books from now on. Not because of the savings in price as much as because of the savings in bookshelf space.

Maggie was utterly heartbroken to have Andy and Jazz leave - they were getting their shoes on, she got hers on, she was all ready for "an Adventure!" Took some persuading to convince her that she shouldn't go to Austin with them.