Library Organization: The Overlong Ramble

Tuesday  in mid-afternoon  Mystie

Brandy has new bookshelves, and I’m trying not to be envious. :) She’s also talking about book categorization, and it’s a topic I can’t resist.

When we moved to our last house several years ago, I did catalog all our books on LibraryThing as I unpacked the boxes. Then the next year I figured out categories and tagged the books on LibraryThing whenever I felt like wasting time on the internet (before Facebook). Perhaps most surprisingly, I actually kept up with entering newcomers into the database, too, so it has remained current. Of course, it helps that I love keeping lists, and a catalog is simply a list; in this case, one with pictures and one that will tell me when I’ve finally reached the 1,000 mark. I’m currently at 606, but that does count picture books.

My shelves are currently organized intuitively rather than fastidiously. One bookcase has literature/fiction chronologically (with one disheveled shelf of juvenile fiction); one has commentaries, theology books, and history; and one has family, homekeeping, culture, education, and language books — I think of it as “my” bookshelf.

The next step in library organization is adding a labeling/shelving component. It is good to know what books you have, but you must also be able to easily find them. Right now, that’s not hard because it’s only three bookcases and a few bins of picture books. The 1,000 mark is the milestone in my head where I think I will need some sort of shelving & labeling system; however, I am also now realizing that it will not be long before Matt and I are not the sole users of these books. A labeling system must happen before children start accessing these books. Already, as I mentioned, the shelf meant for chapter books Hans has or can read (and therefore that Jaeger wants to page through, also) is a jumbled chaos of mistreated books. And our picture book collection is large enough now that it is not usable for or maintainable by the children. So, that’s where the process shall begin, and we shall see how far, and how quickly, it goes.

My angst has been over what and where I am willing to affix on my books, and also what wording or call-number system I want to commit to. I have toyed with the idea of a modified Library of Congress system, especially when I thought LibraryThing would automatically tell me what number all my books are in that system. It doesn’t. I don’t like the Dewey system (it separates books I think should be together), so it’s out. I have tinkered with creating my own call-letter/number rubric, but that’s a hassle, which means I won’t stick to it even if I create it.

The solution came to me this week. Return address labels are small enough yet have enough room to contain pertinent information, and I have a bunch already. I already have categories and tags worked out, and they correspond with how I like them shelved. So, each book will have a return address label either on the back or on the inside cover (I haven’t decided which, although my guess is that it will be more readily used and followed if one doesn’t have to open the book to see the label; I refuse to put a label on the spine). The label will list the main category and, underneath that, its primary subtopic. I foresee each main category in the future receiving its own bookcase (or two), with subtopics grouped together. In the case of literature, fiction, and history, which I shelve chronologically, the “subtopic” will be the year (or century) it belongs to.

The stickiest category I have is “juvenile fiction” or “juvenile literature.” In my catalog already “Literature” and “Fiction” are separate categories. There is no way Homer and Milton and Austen will be in the same category as Tom Clancy or Francine Rivers in my system, and I am ok making the judgment call between the two, acknowledging that it will be my own quirky judgment. My general guideline for deciding between the two is whether the book deals with universal or timeless themes (thus, Heinlein gets the honor of a “Literature” title, even though it’s science fiction; but, Lewis’ science fiction is also literature. Science fiction is the only option the modern author has for faerie) or whether it was written primarily to be entertainment. I have nothing against an entertaining book — I enjoy a good “popcorn” read — but to me “literature” and “fiction” are two distinct species. My blurriest author is Wodehouse. Really, I know he’s fiction. His purpose is entertainment. Yet he is also literary. You haven’t lived if you haven’t read Wodehouse, so shouldn’t he go with the classics? Anyway, back to the “juvenile” issue. Is “juvenile” a subtopic for literature and fiction or is it its own main category, with subdivisions between literature and fiction? I dislike the tag “juvenile” at all in the first place, so if you have another word I could substitute, maybe all the angst would go away. “That’s juvenile” is an insult, and while I don’t mind insulting most early readers in that way, I feel guilty slapping it on the back cover of Narnia. And what of Tolkien’s short stories? They are perfect for the 8-10 crowd, but most of them weren’t written for that crowd, and they aren’t particularly “juvenile” at all. On top of that, I don’t want to separate them out from Tolkien’s section of the shelf. So, my mind is still working on this one, but the quote keeps coming back to me, “No book is worth reading at 10 if it’s not worth reading at 50.” And, I really only want to own books like Narnia, Little House, Wind in the Willows, that I want my children to read and reread and that I hope will make up the furniture of their minds. For filler books the library is half-a-mile down the road. So, my answer might be just a special shelf or two that will have some special name.

Picture books, however, is a separate issue. I recently purchased several dishpans and moved them from a short bookshelf, where they were not being shelved rightly and receiving much abuse, to standing upright in the tubs. Still, they frequently do just get stacked horizontally on top of the vertically aligned books, wreaking havoc on their covers when the bins then get jostled. Ugh. It’s true, I have resorted in the past to boxing and storing ALL their books because of the way they were being treated. My latest saying to the children has been, “If you can’t take care of it, you can’t have it.” But I want to make it easy for them to take care of their stuff, too. So the bins have subcategories written on them and the books were sorted. It didn’t last long, of course. I believe I will assign each subcategory a color and stick a circle of that color to the back of each book (again, it has to be quick and easy to use, and my children are not perfectionists and order-lovers naturally, so putting anything inside adds another step to its use and increases the likelihood that it will not be heeded) and to the appropriate bin. Accomplishing that is on my “list of time-consuming and unnecessary but entertaining organization projects I can do while waiting for the baby to come.”

Next up: the categories and subcategories I have decided upon.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Curator. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.