How Do You Organize Your Books?

Hi,

I'm not new to LibraryThing but I always wondered how people organize their virtual libraries. Also I'm looking for a solution to an issue I have.

I downsize my home library all the time. It comes in handy to have a list that shows me what books I currently have in my home library. At the same time, I would also like to keep track of all the books I read and not necessarily own anymore (like the ones I previously owned or borrowed from the library).

Any ideas on how I can do that?

I get distracted when there are so many filters to use. I was wondering if it's possible to create shelves as opposed to using tags to sort. Are "collections" the equivalent of "shelves" in LT?

Also share anything about your organization if you like :)

I am using "My Library" collection for anything I have around the house on paper, "Read but unowned" collection for anything that I had read but do not own (because it was from the library or I gave it away or simply lost it) and a "Kindle" collection for my Kindle books. Add to this a tag of "read" for the books that I had read, regardless of collection and a few other collections and tabs for finer splitting - and it works for me.

And yes - collections could be considered shelves with the note that a book can belong to more than one collection.

As long as you keep them separate enough, my split also helps me with the color codes - green for everything on paper around the house, blue for what I had read but do not own, grey remains for Kindle and the few special collections (borrowed and library - both of which will fold into Read but unowned in the long run), purple for Wishlist which contains the books I have on hold in my libraries.

That's nice, thank you for sharing Annie. Will definitely add the Kindle category.

I'm wondering though, so if you want to know in total how many books you "own" as opposed to have read, how would you be able to find out since I'm assuming the total of items under My Library will include everything? What I mean is, will each collection calculate the number of its books separately? (sorry if this is a stupid question but some other services don't do this)

Also the color coding would seriously be helpful. Do they color code automatically or can you assign them as in calendars?

Nope - My Library is ONLY books I own now - that is all I am adding there. If I give away a book, it gets moved into Read but Unowned. :) So it is easy to find how many I actually have around the house. When I finish cataloging them anyway :) Each collection tells you how many books are inside of it; All collections total will tell you how many books you have in all collections. Take a look at my profile and see how it looks like.

Colors are automatic - see https://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Checkmarks for more details.

Ah I see what you mean, I feel stupid now hehe. Got it! Really helpful :) Thanks Annie!

Hopping on the link right now!

Naah - LT has a lot of weird features - asking is never a problem :)

Have fun organizing your library! :)

Each collection has the number of books in it visible in several places, including on your profile.

Once you have more than one collection there will also be 'all collections' listed at the end. Like @AnnieMod, I use 'Your Library' only for paper books we own, so that number for me is somewhat lower than the number of books in the house. (I keep finding a few I have missed.)

I have collections for a few subject areas. For example, Theology. That is on the one hand strictly defined as only books we own, on the other hand loosely, as it really includes anything I think is related to religion, including some fiction. If I go to the catalogue and bring up that collection, I can click on tags and get a list of all the tags I have used on books in that collection. If I then go down the list, I can see that I have 78 books in the Theology collection tagged Fiction. I can also use that link to call them up.

Another thing you can do is go to Stats/Memes from your profile or home page. At the bottom left is a link for collections. My page is http://www.librarything.com/profile/MarthaJeanne/stats/collections There you see how your collections overlap. You can even see the inverse of the collections. There are lots of ways to see statistics of your books on LT. Another useful link from the stats page is Work Duplicates. Again, here's mine. http://www.librarything.com/profile/MarthaJeanne/stats/workdups. You can see that these are mostly cases where we have the same book in two (or more) languages, but also a few cases where I need to find both copies and throw one away.

My collection for 'E-books' contains various formats, which I don't bother to tag there, although if I got it from Gutenberg or OverDrive, I do use tags, so I could get it get it again.

My collections incude ones for ownership status (including collections for books that belong to my husband and son, if that seems appropriate), for reading status, a few special subjects, and then a few that have to do with keeping track of things in LT. For example, once I really knew how I want my entries to look I put everything up to that point into a 'Needs Checking' collection. Yes, I am slowly nibbling away at that one. I've got it under 3 000 now! The working collection at the top comes from a project to check the science fiction shelves against the catalogue. Not quite done.

Collections more or less the same as the people above: I use "My library" for paper books, adding "To read" for paper books I haven't read yet; I've made an "Ebooks" collection for ebooks I've bought, and I use "Read but not owned" for borrowed books, non-copyright ebooks and paper books I've disposed of.

I've noticed lately that this assignment is frequently wrong in my catalogue - probably because I forgot to change the collections when I imported a book (especially with the iPhone app it's easy to overlook this) - but it doesn't seem to matter much, because I rarely use it as a filter when searching the catalogue. I usually stay on the "All collections" view.

I use tags for identifying content across collections (the first tag in the list is usually the one that identifies where that book would be shelved, e.g. "fiction", "poetry", "travel"). I could imagine using collections when you need to group things at higher level not directly connected to the content - books you use at work, set books for a specific course, books inherited from grandparents. But I've never really felt the need to do that...

I use the tag "Recycled" to keep track of books that are gone to second-hand shops, returned to the library, thrown into the oven, returned to whoever lent it to me, etc
Sometimes with a note in Comment or Private Comment.
My use of LT predates collections, so that's probably why I use tags :-)

Wow everyone's input is fantastic!! Thank you so much. I'm getting a lot of ideas. The choices are endless I guess. I have to sit and think about this and make a plan (I think I derive joy from sorting and organizing hehe). Like for example what's the benefits of putting my "to read" books under collections as opposed to a tag.

Thank you again. Martha I'm checking the links now!

Poking into other members' libraries was a good way for me to see options for organizing.

Indeed. Poking into yours right now :)

>10 Teacup_:
One thing no-one's mentioned yet, which may or may not matter to you: tags go into the pooled "social data" of the work (so if I go to the work page I can see it's owned by five members, one of whom has tagged it "living-room" and another "unread"...), whilst collections just apply to the copy in your library.

I use some of the default LT collections (Read but unowned and wishlist) because of the colored checkmarks. I consider any and all e-books to be unowned, even if I have a pdf copy, and I mark the format in the new format fields.

For the books that I physically own, I segregate them on LT on the basis of recommendations. I have a large collection of manga and graphic novels, but I generally don't want them to factor into my recs or my connections to people with similar libraries (otherwise it will dominate my entire connections feed). I also segregate other kinds of niche books like gaming manuals or certain bits of my partner's comics collection for the same reasons. If I were not using LT for recs or checkmarks, I would group them differently and split it more along the lines of recreational vs. educational vs. social.

>13 thorold: thorold, valuable info thank you!

>14 macsbrains: Macbrains, wow that's a little too advanced for me hehe. I'm impressed though!

The colored checkmarks are the one bit from the standing collections that I really wish we could use on our own collections. I've been toying with the idea of making my ebooks as part of my library, and my regular books as read but unowned, and my contains-in/contained-in as wishlist books, just so that I could have colored checkmarks show with the hierarchy that I want, but it would mean something different to everyone else than it does to me.

>16 bestem: I feel the same way. When the checkmarks were introduced I tossed out all my original collections and restructured because of it. The checkmarks are one of my favorite features, but the default colletion names annoy me so much. I also use the Currently Reading collection solely because it shows up on my profile. Not that anyone else is ever looking at my profile, but I am looking at it.

>16 bestem: bestem
>17 macsbrains: macsbrains

The "Your library" was slightly annoying me too. I wanted so badly to rename the collection titles :|

My own library is a work in progress, but I found my years of tagging to be unwieldy and cruft-laden. For example, I had inconsistent tags like "non fiction", "nonfiction" and "non-fiction", which is not very helpful. There were also many cases where the information in tags was better moved to Collections, Series, or Notes, since those facilities were introduced.

So I recently removed all the tags from my books (a task that I feel was needlessly difficult), and retagged everything with a limited and defined set of tags, only introducing new ones very cautiously. The best thing is using the WikiThing to document my choices. Keeps things tidy. Mine is here:

https://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/User:AleatoricConsonance

And my library is here: https://www.librarything.com/catalog/AleatoricConsonance

Definitely a "less is more" approach.

>19 AleatoricConsonance: The reason that it's not easy to remove all the tags in a library at once is so that someone can't mistakenly hit one button and 5 or 6 years of tags (that they want to keep) are all gone lickety split.

>20 DanieXJ:

But you can click one button and delete all the books in your library :) Which is worse ;)

>19 AleatoricConsonance: Wow liked browsing your organization! It's actually pretty well kept :) It's truly a valuable tip to keep the tags as simple and as minimum as possible. This is something that I also face at work. I'm a librarian and sometimes it makes me go crazy when automatically cataloging books will download its own set of subject headings that isn't consistent with other books. There would be several variations of the same tag/heading so when I'm searching for a particular thing, there's a good chance I'm not getting everything. As a result, I do sit from time to time to fix everything and keep it consistent :| Daunting but needs to be done.

I'm curious, what's the tag "fix" for?

>20 DanieXJ: A couple of "Are you REALLY sure?" dialogs would solve this problem, and it would have saved me hours and repetitive clicking.

>22 Teacup_: Thank you. I envy you your librarian job! You're definitely one of the good guys!

"Fix" tag just marks books that need some attention. The most common example would be a cover on my copy is different from the available ones so I need to remember to find one, or scan or upload one. Or it could be some metadata problem or similar.

Much easier than deleting all your tags and starting again is just to look through your tags page for typing errors near-duplicates. I just had a look at mine, and I spotted and was able to correct things like "post-colonial" and "postcolonial", "campus novel" and "campus fiction", "Weimar Republic" and "Weimarer Republik", "clergymen" and "clerical", as well as quite a few upper/lower case and singular/plural pairs.

On the whole, too many tags is better than too few, but you risk missing things you're looking for if you have data randomly distributed between two near-equivalent tags, so that's worth cleaning up.

>25 thorold: I noticed that all your cleaned up tag pairs are the same for the first few characters. It's much easier to spot that kind of difference than if the two tags that should be the same don't end up next to each other when sorted alphabetically, like time travel and temporal displacement. So it does make sense to keep your tag list short enough that when you scan through it you can still remember your earlier tags when you get to the end of it.

If you have a large library and read widely you are not going to be able to keep your tag list that short.

>26 jjwilson61:
Yes, the neighbours in the list are the easiest ones to spot and fix. I've spotted a few others, for instance as well as the cluster "school", "school stories", "schools" and "schoolteachers", I also had "boarding schools" and "teachers". For that sort of thing you have to look at what you've actually tagged to work out whether they are really overlapping. I managed to zap a couple of them, and did some double-tagging with the others, but it's still a mess.

My tags are primarily an aid to help me find the books, as they're (mostly) a reflection of how my books are shelved. A handy dodge occurred to me early on, and I'm posting it on the off-chance that might be as helpful to someone else as it has been for me: I've a lot of books, mostly unsorted ones, that could be in any of several bookcases (or er on the floor). I've started tags noting the placement of those with 'z'; this results in tags showing the subject of a book being grouped apart from tags showing the position of a book which in turn makes searching for a book through my tag list faster.

>24 AleatoricConsonance: Thanks hehe :)

Not necessarily. A big library doesn't need a lot of tags IF you don't want it to. Some of book management softwares I experimented with used two constituents- one broad and one narrow- as the equivalent of tags. This over time became daunting for me. Do I really need my metadata to tell me the book is Fiction on a broad sense, and then narrow it down to Fiction > Family > Children > Autism for instance? Or use several tags for one book?

Based on experience at work, the shorter the list of tags/keywords used, the better. Since the collection is personal and I know each and every book, usually 1 or 2 tags (trying not to exceed 3) is more than enough for me. This also minimizes errors. In a library context this is completely different. The more keywords the better to ensure good search results and it becomes necessary to manage these tags/keywords to keep them consistent.

I have many subject/genre tags, but it's the idiosyncratic ones that are actually useful to me. The more ridiculous the better. Alas, my library doesn't have as many as I would like, nor or they as evocative as I intend them to be, but they are a work in progress.

>31 Teacup_: Sometimes I want to look at a subset of all my fiction, including genre fiction like mystery, sci-fi, etc. Sometimes I want to look at just mystery. Without using both broad and narrow tags, I couldn't do that.

>32 macsbrains: Yes, exactly. I have tags for "too sad to re-read" and "messing about with boats", among others.

Hehe, I think in this case it differs from one person to another. I know I get easily distracted and if I start narrowing down, I'll never stop :D

I see your point though.

>31 Teacup_: Do I really need my metadata to tell me the book is Fiction on a broad sense, and then narrow it down to Fiction > Family > Children > Autism

Probably not: there's a good chance that that sort of high-level classification already exists as imported subject headings at the work level anyway. It's the quirky stuff that's useful as a quick way of remembering where you saw obscure subject-matter. And help other people to find it: I can probably remember which book it was that had a roller-skating horse in it, but would you be able to find it?

>34 Teacup_: That's the beauty of tags! We can all create the system that makes the most sense for our own situation.

>35 thorold: Oh absolutely. If it's for helping others, that is. This might be a stupid question then, hehe, but do you assign tags for public use as well?

>36 rosalita: Yup yup :)

> thorald: Am not sure if this is a valid suggestion, but could you not "copy" and "paste values" of your entire tags list to an Excel worksheet to help in some of the overlaps? I just tried it, and it looks like a promising idea. That way, some of the thinking about organizing can be looked at as a whole.

>38 Diane-bpcb: Yes, that would work. Another possibility is to export the entire library as tab-separated file and import it into excel. Then you can see the combinations of tags that you use. For instance, I use "Fiction" and "Science Fiction" as tags and I want all "Science Fiction" books to be tagged with "Fiction" too. You can have hours of fun with this (especially on a rainy day).

Well, I do love being a nerd about all of this organizing.

>38 Diane-bpcb: >39 bnielsen:
Yes, good ideas! But also dangerous time-sinks, so I might try to postpone that a bit. Excel isn't the easiest tool for dealing with things like tags that come as a list within a field of the table. If you want to dig out all the arbitrary correlations you probably have to write some sort of script. (For known pairs like your science-fiction < fiction example, you don't need to export: power-edit would work.)

>41 thorold: thorald

I see what you mean.

There's always sorting by color, subcategory, by size.

>41 thorold: that is, thorold

>41 thorold: time-sink? But it is necessary!

And yes, I have scripts that export automatically and check lots of things.

Even though I've been here awhile I love when a thread like this appears. I always come up with some new idea (also known as yes, a new 'gonna eat up all the time even though I have less than I used to' time sink) that I can apply to my collections too.

>45 DanieXJ: Yesterday I found out that some of my reviews had a different ' than the rest (probably copy/paste from a windows machine). Cost me a couple of hours sleep, but now it's fixed. And I have a script to warn me if it happen's again.

Just as usual this triggered other bugs/griefs. I can't search for the weird ' (or any other special character) inside LT and search also acts a bit strange when I search for say GD::Graph.

My real project was to make a very simple check for typos in any recently created review: report any word that occur in the most recent review but not in any of the other reviews. That's about four lines of unix commands, but only when the data is consistent :-)

Aren't typos highlighted immediately as you type?

>47 Diane-bpcb: Not when I enter Cedic rather than Cedric as a name. I also have a travel book where the Table of Contents would show up as all typos in a normal context, etc etc. It's still experimental, but the idea was to just let my eyes do the job on a smallish number of new words.

Some of my reviews are typed on a chromebook while I'm sitting in a bus, so typos of the typee wheee the keybooard shifted under the fingers are more common than when I use one of the stationary computers.

Lots of English text (from the Table of Contents) mixed in with the Danish text of a review also makes typo highlighting more or less useless :-)

Well, it looks like you have a lot of fun on your site. I love your Tim Quotes!

>49 Diane-bpcb:. And I've learned a lot about the Catholic Church by stalking Tim :-)

>47 Diane-bpcb: and >49 Diane-bpcb: My simple spellchecker is now up and running:

$ bash spellcheck 1
- checking reviews - the last 1 -
2275
Akhenaten
Calindy
Cyclops
Familienavnet
Hellbrew
Makenzie
Panoptes
Titanite
banks
bonny
c'et
centennial
computerfejl
corridors
desire
listeners
mirror
node
politics
rivals
shriek

So the latest review contained 22 new words and they all look ok to me, so all is well.
Here's the code if anyone wants to borrow the idea.

#!/usr/bin/bash
LAST=$1
test "${LAST}" = '' && LAST=1
echo - checking reviews - the last ${LAST} -
cat /tmp/lt.rdb | perl /tmp/row Date_Read mat '/./' | \
perl /tmp/column Date_Read Review | \
perl /tmp/headchg -del | sort | tac | tail -n +`expr ${LAST} + 1` | tac | cut -f2 | \
tr " " "\n" | sed -e 's/\return\/\n/g' | tr -d '\.\",' | \
sort -u > /tmp/gospel
cat /tmp/lt.rdb | perl /tmp/row Date_Read mat '/./' | \
perl /tmp/column Date_Read Review | \
perl /tmp/headchg -del | sort | tail -${LAST} | cut -f2 | \
tr " " "\n" | sed -e 's/\return\/\n/g' | tr -d '\.\",' | \
sort -u > /tmp/tobetested
cat /tmp/lt.rdb | perl /tmp/row Date_Read mat '/./' | \
perl /tmp/column Date_Read Review | \
perl /tmp/headchg -del | sort | tail -${LAST} | cut -f2 | \
tr " " "\n" | sed -e 's/\return\/\n/g' | tr -d '\.\",' | \
cat -n > /tmp/tobetested-context
dif12 /tmp/tobetested /tmp/gospel | grep '+1-2$' | cut -f1
# cat /tmp/tobetested-context | grep -A5 -B5 håndsk

(All of this is in the context of having turned the exported library data into a very simple database. You could do the same thing a bit simpler by using the number of each column instead of the Date_Read and Review identifiers.)

The idea is very, very simple. Take all reviews except the last, split into words and save in a file.
Take the last review, split into words and save in another file.
Display all words that occur in the last file, but not in the first.

Wow, wish I knew how to use codes like that! I imagine it saves time to have workflows such as these :| I feel old now lol.

>42 Diane-bpcb: more

I was joking here when I suggested sorting books by color, but, you never know. I just happened to be reading an article in the Jun 23, 2014 New Yorker, "The Book Refuge," by Janet Malcolm, about the Argosy Bookstore in Manhattan.
"There is a back room at the Argosy where books for decorators are kept, some arranged by color. All-white libraries are apparently in vogue today among decorators of advanced taste."

Diane, it would be a disaster for me to venture into that risky path. Once I color code, I think there's no way in going back. I already struggle with book heights. They need to be all the same level. You have no idea how many times I readjust my books just by passing my book shelves xD

The color coding reminds me of buying books with bindings or titles that look impressive. Wonderful, if you don't actually read!!
My current problem is that I bought a couple of those "skinny" bookcases which were perfect to get most of my books into cases, but I chose to do it quickly to clean up the place, and now I need to figure out how to organize what was--a long time ago--a roughly "grouped by subject" theme. But will I ever do that?

You'll come around to doing that at some point I'm sure lol. I noticed book organizations come in fluctuating phases. We go into an organizing 'fever' and then it phases out, then it hits again. I can feel the bug in the air... It's flu season :D haha.

You're right, of course.

>1 Teacup_: Hello, yes, the collections are your shelves. So, I have collections that are named owned, read, and currently reading, for example. You can create new ones with any name you need. I would use sold, read but unowned, or read no longer have. Something like that would work just fine. The tags though are another way to sort through the books. If I click a tag on my book, it shows me all the books with that tag that I have.

I have three libraries in my home. The first is the immediate library - its around my work area and have all I need to hand for potential use on a number of subjects. This is sorted by subject. I have the transient library - books I have just read or reread. This is sorted by read date. Its where the most work is done - do they stay or go? From there they either go to the immediate library, leave the house or go the long term one in the attic. I have time to look at the shelves there periodically so there are no snap decisions. I am relatively new to culling but this has worked for me (along with buying more efficient shelves now and again) for the last few years. I use the my library app poorly - mainly to see if I already have a book I want to buy.