In the end I bit the bullet and purchased Readerware. The program is awesome. it is totally configurable with custom columns and so many ways the user can customize the views it’s amazing. The program will adapt to any library requirements you may have, so if you’re considering getting a library program to manage your book collection Readerware is simply the best. Don’t waste your time and money anywhere else.

And Zack – utilizing “gap and slack” is going to be a lifesaver. Otherwise, the organization will be for naught, as the collection grows. The project has already inspired some purging, and the multiple copies turned up by this project are also an eye-opener!

I am sorry to say, in reference to a comment above, that I inkjet-printed 45 pages of labels and wish I had laser printed them, to save the effort of covering with clear tape afterwards. It’s not too late, but a laser printer needs to be located. I am also going to take to heart Brad Knowles’ advice (12/12/07). On the other hand, the clear tape protection can be applied at any time (before the next flood!).
I am definitely recommending earthquake protection for these shelves!

It’s not just kids that create havoc; the Siamese routinely inserts chaos into the lower shelves of paperback fiction: I am recommending that these be boxed in clear plastic archival quality boxes.

I’m afraid I don’t know enough about Excel to help you with your first question, but I know a lot about reshelving books. The best solution I have found is to use slack and a gap. Slack means knowing the books you have well enough to get a good idea where you should leaves some space on the shelves. The gap mean using a mostly empty bookshelf in the middle. As you sort the books the empty shelf gives you more space for shuffling things around.

I hope this helps and good luck with your project.

Another interesting fact is that often times the professor I was working for would have gathered some interesting fiction that related to or illustrated a particular subject or era in history and shelved it (in his informal system) with the nonfiction. But in our new system, the fiction will be shelved far from its nonfiction cousins. However, Readerware stores keywords and subject headings, so I hope that the works of fiction can eventually be found again by consulting the catalog.

I cataloged all the books shelf by shelf, labelling each item in the database with its shelf number (arbitrarily/temporarily assigned, 1-53). Because I am slightly a perfectionist, I averaged 20 books an hour because so many ISBN’s (paperbacks mostly) were incorrect and many books did not have barcodes (I did purchase a high quality barcode scanner by SerialIO – the LaserChamp).

In addition, he wanted labels. I ordered my labels from Brodart as they also supplied very detailed templates so I could create a custom label in MS Word (Avery doesn’t have any appropriate labels). I planned to use the merge feature with Word, using Excel or Word as the datasource.

Exporting from Readerware to Excel is a breeze. In Excel I cleaned up the Library of Congress call numbers but found that it did not alphabetize totally correctly (how do you tell Excel that HD 51 is a whole number and not a decimal so that it will place HD 51 before HD 4000? Excel experts out there – please help!). I did a bit of tweaking and further imported the data into a Word table in order to insert paragraph spaces so the labels would wrap correctly. (Used a combination of search and replace and manual techniques.) I used the Word tables imported from Excel as datasources for my merge because of the better editing tools and better merge results. The result of the merge are beautiful labels but a lot of hand correcting is needed. After they were perfect, I printed out all the labels and they are ready to apply shelf by shelf. The labels are in same order as each shelf of books, very nearly.

Only then will we attempt to organize alphabetically by LOC number. Any suggestions? Each shelf is in LOC order but the whole library now has to be reshelved in the proper order. We are also deliberating on whether to protect the books with clear tape first, and whether to apply the tape over the label as well. Some of the books are splendid volumes from the 20s, 30s, and 40s, and I purchased archival book ID strips, and will apply labels to those (they stick out the top). Wish us luck in the next phase!

I will try to convince the professor that importing his books into Google Books or LibraryThing will be rewarding. In Google Books “My Library” you will have cover images (you can have them in Readerware as well if you auto-update using Amazon), and be able to search instantly by keyword and even for text snippets if the book has been digitized! However, the books will appear in no particular order that would be useful to you, though they are instantly findable. You can carry your Readerware database around in a Palm-based system or on your netbook, or you can consult your “Google” or LibraryThing library to avoid buying duplicates.

I imagine that in order to maintain this book catalog, newly obtained books will need to reside on the “new shelf” and when enough are accumulated, they will need to be scanned in to the catalog, and labels created, and then added. Leaving space in the most popular subject categories sounds like a good idea.

I live in Oakland, CA and I’m looking for my next project!!
-Emily

I am a library student and I found that grappling with the myriad problems associated with cataloging a personal library without all the cataloging tools at your disposal in a regular library was very challenging. Thank you Readerware, SerialIO, and all the suggestions I have read online!