Please add ability to organize/order/number your books

I wish the site allowed users the option of numbering their books (like Netflix does with movies in your queue). In Netflix, you can assign any movie a number and the movies then show up in your queue in that order. If you insert or delete a movie from the list, the remaining movies automatically move up or down a number.

Such an option would allow users to organize their books on librarything in the same exact order they are on their shelves, which would make tracking and finding books much easier and would make the site more useful.

You can do that with a list. Maybe not an ideal situation, because everyone can see the list, but definitely doable, and very easy to reorder if you change the order of your books on the shelf.

See also this thread for a couple of other suggestions on numbering in the background: https://www.librarything.com/topic/173733

ETA: Maybe the option mentioned in posts 5 and 10?

Hi I see great benefit to being able to order books as you wish. It's a bit irritating not being able to order books on the shelf, and in effect customise your member home page.A small change that would benefit us all. Would be a welcomed improvement

Look at @BTRIPP's library - he's got all his books carefully tagged with their precise location (as the first tag in the field). So sorting by the tag field displays his books in shelf order. Or the BCID field, as suggested in the thread linked in Msg 3.

The other alternative is to shelve your books in some order that sorts properly - by Dewey, perhaps. It's a lot of trouble to reshelve the books, but after that you always know where something is, and at least theoretically the same subjects are together (particularly as you can enter your own Dewey numbers, if you think of a book as falling in a different area than most libraries put it).

The problem with lists is that you have to add all your books to it - not as complex as adding them to LT in the first place, but still another place to keep things in order.

I want to emphasize that there is not, and will never be, a way to force visitors to view your library in the way you want them to. You can have a "suggested viewing style" to pick and choose which fields to show them, but that doesn't include sort order, and viewers will always be able to view your books sorted in any order they choose. (Alphabetical by author, date added, Dewey order, etc.) You can use tags, comments, BCID, etc. to create a customized sort order that you can use and recommend to visitors, but you can't force it on others.

Yeah, but the OP seems to be talking about matching shelf order, so that it's easier to find a book you own - not aimed at visitors at all.

Though, you know, it wouldn't help much - if you search for a book it doesn't show it in context, so you'd have to page through your library until you found it (and scan carefully to make sure you didn't miss it). It would be easier if you used tags or the equivalent - then you could search and the book would tell you, individually, where it was. Just being able to sort in shelf order would be rather limited.

Re. #5: My tagging system comes in quite handy when my daughters need books for projects ... recently one needed Seven Years in Tibet and the other needed To Your Scattered Bodies Go (obviously for very different projects), and in each case I was able to put my hand on the book within a couple of minutes.

My biggest challenge, of late, is that I've run out of shelf space, and have taken up "shelving" my books in moving boxes ... I'll measure a stack of books (I file my books in order of completion - as it makes it easier for me to remember what was when) to a height equivalent to a shelf's width on my current bookcases, then put them in the box as closely as possible to the order they'd be on the shelf, and then label the box as though it was a shelf on a bookcase. I believe I'm into my third "phantom bookcase" at this point with this system (still waiting for that big lottery prize so I can move my "office" out of my "library" and run another set of bookcases up the middle of the room)!

The system I put together uses tags along these lines: "filed c12-s2-b40" - which in this example is bookCase #12, Shelf #2, and Book #40 (although that is actually one of the moving boxes).

I use Collections to indicate location of book in my house . . . Each bookshelf has a name which corresponds to a Collection . . . within each bookshelf/Collection most books are alphabetical by author or some other grouping I can remember . . . For me, the whole reason I needed to catalog my books in the first place was because I could no longer remember what I had and what I didn't, or what I had read and what I hadn't, or where I might have shelved a book . . . (I have nearly 2000 books in my house.) Just another option.

I would like to see this done as well. When I sort my books by author, the titles show up in the order that I entered them. It would be great if we could simply reorganize our shelves by dragging a book to its proper position. I don't like it when my series are out of order.

>10 Nickpickle05: It doesn't help with making series show in their proper order, but you can have your catalog sort by any of the sortable columns, not just the entry date (e.g. alpha by title/author or date read)

10>

So tag by series and order, and sub-sort by that. Not draggable but it accomplishes the same thing. (Having it be draggable implies that you could only have One Search Order Ever, which would be a nightmare.)

>10 Nickpickle05: You can sort by more than one column--author first, then title, for example--by clicking on the box with the up and down arrows, just to the right of the Style choices. If you hover over the button, it will say "edit sort order."

or first sort by your subsort, and then your main sort. Ie if you first click on titles and then on authors, the books will be sorted by authors with the titles alphabetically in each author.

Now that we can sort by private comment, you can add a private comment with a numeric order.

Yes, but you still can't add a comment with a negative numeric order. And no, I am not concerned with how others view my catalog; only with how I am able to view it in order to organize my books or quickly find them for my own use.

And I'm not as concerned with finding them quickly as I am in having them organized in the manner I want, which LT currently won't accommodate as I organize my books by OPD and/or date of the subject matter (i.e., I would place a 2005 biography of Caesar next to Caesar's Gallic War book which has an OPD sometime between 46 BCE and 40 BCE).

>16 tnilsson: Well, you could get what you want by using call numbers. Make up your own. You can sort by them.

Yeah.

You're not even using date for anything vaguely related to the date of the actual book at this point. Use comments, or personal call numbers, or tags, all of which are sortable.

This option is availabe in CLZ Book Collector.. and it`s very useful when you record a book then later you discover/ get another book to add that must be recorded along with the first one, so I can change numbering easily... if the first book is index 300 and current book is to have index 916 then I can give book 301 a 916 numbering then give allocate numering 301 to the new book..
BUT, don`t forget that LT is URL based, not program records- based.. so book numbers here are included in URLs and can`t be changed.
Here at LT, The reply #9 above should be the best and only option in your case.. otherwise, you`ll have to use CLZ and to use its online library system which is seamlessy synced with changed at CLZ program. (Yes, their web service is always in sync with their app service, whatever changed you do).. But keep in mind that it`s a paid service if you have more than 100 books. (Although this may not be the accurate number.. I don`t remeber well for now)

I thought of giving your same feature request before, but I am a programmer and I know it`s difficult to apply it in LT web environment.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/188345

There is the new custom call number system that was installed just recently. Perhaps this might work for the OP. They can put whatever they want in that field that's a number.

@gilroy #21:
If you mean a call number in the format 1,2,3 NOT a call number in the known format which includes cutter and such details/rules then, yes, this is perfect!
BUT, which purpose was the new feature created for?
If this isn`t a formal call number system, I`d like to suggest feature name change.. else, this will result in invalid call numbers, and that will be worst upon exporting to other systems which define a call number normally.

>22 cairoartsjp:

It can be used either for formal call number systems other than DDC and LOC which have long been supported or for ad-hoc individual call numbers. There's no sort of verification or normalization.

@lorax #23
Good! Nice news!

I don't think it allows negative numbers though. And especially not sorting in any manner that would allow sorting where -3000 would come before -50, with both before 1944.

>25 tnilsson: I tried it out, and you're half right - negative numbers can go in, and sort correctly before positive numbers (though blanks sort first, so you'd have to enter all/most of the dates before you could see these easily). However, they sort in text order - so 400 is after 1944 which is after -55... Sorting reversed (so that the newest date should be at the top):

400
1944
0200
-55
-3000
-250

I don't know if Tim could/would either change it to default to number sorting (where 400 is less than 1944 - it looks at the whole thing, not character by character) or make that an option.

But either way it doesn't easily allow you to shift stuff to make room for new ones, unless you put the original numbers in gappy - that is, list one book as 10 and the next as 20, so you could put in 11-19 if/when necessary. Even harder with dates, which really need number sorting. Or prepended 0s - nope, that works fine for positive but makes negative numbers reversed (counting from most recent, 1944, 0400, 0200, -3000, -0250, -0055).

I think you are stuck with text order because custom call numbers aren't limited to numerals. What would number sorting do with letters?

Yeah - it would either have to parse the field (and sort differently depending on what the data was - very expensive), or pretend everything was a number - which means either ignore letters entirely (can't sort at all on a letter-only entry!) or sort by ASCII/Unicode data. Which might almost sort of work - except that capital letters would sort separately from lower case...yeesh. No, afraid not. Unless Tim wants to add it as a user-selectable choice (and we know how much he loves that!), not going to happen.