On the shelf
It was bound to happen. As I reflected on my last blog post, I wondered about my own art/craft book collection and how it's organised. I reached the conclusion that although there is no real system, I try to keep books on similar themes together. So there are shelves of embroidery books, including one with specifically machine embroidery techniques and there are smaller groups of books on digital printing, braiding. tassels...and more.
But even so, I sometimes struggle to find a particular book, even though I *know* I own it. I wondered if, perhaps it's time to catalogue them? For the last couple of months, my hero has been cataloguing and digitising his complete music collection - more than 3000 CDs - and I thought that there must be a similar program for books. An app, maybe?
I downloaded the (free) app to my phone and immediately scanned the barcodes of the two new books on my desk - Rulerwork Quilting Ideas and Cutting Machine Crafts and the details immediately popped up on screen. Wow. But what about older books?
I scanned another, random choice from my shelf.
Oh my. Some titles came up with copious notes about the content in addition to the basic details and cover shot too. But if I was going to do this, I needed a system - better start at the top left shelf and work my way along.
In no time at all, I'd recorded a couple of hundred books and one whole bookcase. Mostly, I didn't even have to take the book from the shelf, but simply pulled it out far enough to squeeze my phone camera and scan the barcode, but with older books, I needed to input the title/author details manually. Occasionally, I replaced the cover shot with a fresh one of my own - all remarkably simple to do using the in-built feature.
That was yesterday. This afternoon, I've input the last book in my craft collection and My Library tells me there are 760 books in the xls file which I just exported to Dropbox so I can access it anywhere. The whole process took me no more than four or five hours (I've been out most of today) and I can hear the siren call of the art books and the cookbooks too.
The surprising thing is, I found only one duplicate! I seem to have two copies of the small Shire book about Samplers , currently reselling for 1p on Amazon, so I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. If it would plug a gap in your library, though, it's yours!
