By James Adams

As any book lover can attest, it is a rather frustrating feeling to come home from a recent trip to the bookstore only to find that two of the five books you just purchased were already on your shelf. Not only do you then make the return trip to undoubtedly replace those two duplicates with two new books to join the queue for your reading pleasure, but you live with the fear that the next trip you take to the bookstore will result in the same situation.

The only consolation is that if the book appealed enough to you on two separate occasions then it should probably join the beginning of the queue as you’re sure to want to read it. The question then remains is how do you avoid this from happening again? How do you organise your personal library into something navigable and logical? Here are some easy steps to follow giving order to the chaos that has become your personal library.

Step 1: Identify those items that you wish to join your personal library.

Step 2: Sort through your items, donating or discarding those items that are no longer applicable to your taste or needs while keeping those items that you wish to comprise your library.

Step 3: Make an inventory of your items.

Step 4: File your items logically on your shelves.

These four steps are a basic core to the process of organising your library; however the last two, and incidentally most important, steps can create mass confusion and panic if you do not have a method in place to create your inventory and file your items.

The first step to this task is to determine how you want to organise your items. Every person has a different way of thinking and thus will have a different optimal way of filing their books to best retrieve one quickly when needed. So the key to success in organising your library is to figure out what your optimal filing method is. How do you do this? Try this short exercise to help you pinpoint a method that will optimise your sorting and search time.

Think of the last book that you read. What was the first thing that came to mind? Did you visualise the book and the cover? Did you see it as a paperback or hardcover of a certain height and colour? If so, you may benefit most by organising your books by physical features. By doing so, you will optimise the amount of time it will take you to find a particular book that you are looking for. You could organise your books by height, colour, or type. In this way, you cater your shelves to your own particular way of thinking.

If instead when you thought of the last book that you had read you thought of the title of the book, then you may want to sort your books by title or genre. In large collections of books, it is often beneficial to use sub-categories. Sorting books by genre then sub-sorting them by title may be a useful tool in this situation. This method would allow you to immediately identify the genre on the shelf and then find the book through an alphabetical search; much like a bookstore sorts its titles.

If when you thought of the last book that you had read you immediately thought of the author, then it may be optimal to sort alphabetically by author again utilising sub-categories when they help to logically sub-sort the books that are being included in your library.

However, if you thought instead of content, you may benefit most from using meta-data and electronic inventory tracking in order to sort through the books in your collection.

Meta-data may be a foreign concept. Whether you choose to sort your collection by topic or not, you may find that keeping meta-data on your books is useful nonetheless. Meta-data are additional keywords or information about an item. In the case of a book, it could include the author, title, genre, character name, or setting which quickly identifies the book in your collection. You can also personalise your meta-data with your own notes. When using an electronic inventory method, it would be a simple search on the meta-data within your library to find the book in your collection.

An inventory method is often essential to keep a large collection of books organised. While useful, it will be the most time consuming step of organising your library. As such, it is important to lay out the method of keeping inventory prior to starting in order to minimise the amount of time you spend on this step.

So that brings us to the last crucial step prior to implementation and that is of choosing an inventory method. The tried and true method is to catalogue your books on paper and pencil. This will arguably take the longest time to complete and be the least useful if you often use your inventory to search for titles included in your collection. However, it holds a certain antiquated charm for those collections that don’t often use inventory to search. The modern organiser will use an electronic inventory system. There are those that exist which only require an ISBN number be input into the system to identify most books that would be in your collection. For the especially lazy, various systems exist that interface with a bar code reader to truly speed up the process of keeping track of the books in your library. However, whichever method you choose, so long as it works for you and you are willing to keep it up to date, then it will be ideal for your library.

In the end the most time consuming part of the process is implementation of the decisions you just made. Now enjoy the feeling of a new, simplified, organised library.

Author Information

James Adams writes about consumables for HP printers at CartridgeSave.co.uk.