Best way to sort a home library

Hi, I have recently completed scanning ~2300 books for my home library and am now looking to organize my shelves. I wanted to get any tips and tricks from the pros here on approaches to consider. Currently I'm thinking of using MDS.

The MDS breakdown is as follows:
0XX (Computer science, information & general works): 41
1XX (Philosophy & psychology): 46
2XX (Religion): 33
3XX (Social sciences): 165
4XX (Language): 51
5XX (Science): 100
6XX (Technology): 266
7XX (Arts & recreation): 366
8XX (Literature): 409
9XX (History & geography): 144

Note these numbers don't account for around 700 books that don't have a Dewey Decimal number, so the real total in each category is higher.

I was thinking of basically trying to sort at the top-level, and then perhaps into the 2nd level of MDS when needed, and having a separate section just for childrens books since I have probably 500 of various types.

There are also genres to consider as a sorting approach, as well as LC subjects.

For anyone who has organized a library of roughly similar size, how did you do it? I want it to be relatively easy to find a book I am looking for, but I don't want to make myself crazy with intricate classification schemes...

I don't have that many books; but if you want to skip intricate classification schemes, why not have shelves grouped topic (MDS or otherwise) and then alphabetical by author & title?

>1 carolusmagnus:

I want it to be relatively easy to find a book I am looking for,

What I have done is to organize fiction alpha by author, but I include within that books about the author (lit crit, bios, etc.). Non-fiction is generally organized by subject, but that can, I admit, get complicated. Should a book about kimono, for example, be shelved under "fashion" or with books about other forms of Japanese art? So what I try to do is think about where I would look for a book, and that isn't always where Dewey or the LOC would put it.

If this is a home (personal) library, the best way to sort books is so that they are in the first place you would look for them. If this means using the first one or two Dewey decimals and then sorting by author's last name, then that's what you should do. If this means ignoring Dewey entirely and having sections for the subjects you are most interested in (classic philosophy next to historical nonfiction next to historical fiction next to historical romance next to romance, for example), then that's what you should do. If you are most likely to remember what colour the cover was of the book you're seeking, maybe you should sort by colour. When I was younger, I sorted all my books by acquisition date, because it stood out clearly in my mind: I've had this book for as long as I can remember, got that one for my birthday two years ago, picked this one up on holiday in 2001, and here are my purchases from yesterday. I had a riveting discussion on this very website about the merits and demerits of sorting books by their original publication date, which is how classics are sorted in this collection: why shelf Austen next to Atwood when there's over a 150 years between them? If it makes more sense to have a shelf of your favourites and a shelf of books you plan to read soon and a shelf of books you'll read someday, when you get around to it, and a shelf of books meant for reference and not to be read through front-to-back, then that's what you should do.

The point of any classification scheme is so that books can be found quickly by the users of that library. If the user is mostly or exclusively you, then the best system is the one that will be easiest for you to navigate and remember.

If Dewey doesn't come naturally to you, try dividing your books into groups. You can use tags on LT, or you can stack piles in different rooms or different areas, or make lists in a notebook, or put images of all your covers on a computer programme where you can drag them around. The groups don't have to follow any kind of standard, they don't even have to have a name, they just have to make sense to you. They have to be categories that you would think of first (or maybe second) thing when reaching for a particular book. If something fits in two different groups (is Cinderella Ate My Daughter feminism or parenting? Should I put my fancy leather-bound copy of The Hobbit with the collectable beautiful books conveniently in the background of all my work-from-home video calls, or with my fantasy books?), maybe put those two groups right next to each other when you get them back on the shelves, and put the in-between books bridging those two categories.

That will help you more than anything else, and if you want to stop there, or leave the rest of the sorting for another day, that step alone will massively make your life easier. If you want to do more sorting, use the randomise feature (should be on the left side of the page towards the bottom at http://www.librarything.com/profile/MEMBERNAME although I don't know where it is on mobile, if you use that) to get 9 titles. Imagine that you're looking for each of those titles in your library, one at a time. Did you correctly remember which section you assigned it to? Once you get to that section, how are you going to search for it? Title, author last name, colour of the spine, size of the book, date published or acquired? Which books would you expect to see next to it, and what are the common factors that place them near to each other in your mind (other books that take place in Australia, other books about the 1800s, other books that were given to you as gifts by beloved friends, other books that are purplish?) This will give you clues that will help you determine the best way to sort so that you can find your books fastest.

No one person's brain works exactly the same as anyone else's. In my own home, if my books were in groups that made sense to me, I could memorise the individual locations of each volume even if it were initially randomised. Place memory is easy for me. I know that book; it's on the second bedroom bookcase, fourth shelf from the top, slightly left of center. I can see the precise location in my mind and fetch the books almost immediately. If you know your brain works like this, the easiest method would probably be to divide the books into groups and them immediately shelve them in whatever order they wind up in, leaving room for new books to slot in, and then you can start memorising locations immediately. If your brain doesn't work like that, it's probably best to sort them another way.

At the end of the day, the 'best' way to sort a personal library is a personal answer, and requires some personal self-knowledge. I hope that helped somewhat!

It's worth mentioning that there is a dedicated field for 'other call number', so whatever system you come up with, you can have a notation that quickly tells you where to find it in your own library.

>5 SandraArdnas: Or at least where to start looking for it :-) I scan all my covers and enter physical dimensions, so I have more way than one to locate a missing book.

>6 bnielsen: Any system is only as good as your ability to actually reshelve books regularly. And to update your record if you lend, discard, or move the book.

The best system is one that works for you, and helps you get the books back where they belong after you use them.

>6 bnielsen: Hahaha, yes it kind of depends on not leaving them around in unlikely places and reshelving periodically.

>8 SandraArdnas: I came across a fascinating system at one second hand book dealer I visited a couple of years ago. His storage area was basically a lot of book shelves numbered like: room 4, area 7, shelve 5. Any books entering his system would then get a code like 4-7-5. This allowed him to quickly register any incoming books (i.e. 200 books from a box would get very similar codes, maybe 50 x 9-1-2, 50 x 9-1-3, 50 x 9-1-4, 50 x 9-1-5, allowing him to register en masse and then shelve the books afterwards).
Only problem with the system was that similar books might end up in different rooms, but since he only needed to locate books he sold that was probably not a problem at all.

>9 bnielsen: That is how remote storage works. A tray of books will be acquired. That tray will be given a location (usually area, shelf, tray number) in the building. Multiple copies of books almost never end up in the same tray, shelf, or area.

Thanks for all of the replies. It's not just for me it's a library for my family so for my spouse and kids and includes books for all of them. I'm looking for something somewhat consistent, and ideally something I don't have to think too much about which is why i was considering something like MDS, but I may end up doing some combination of MDS with some exceptions or extensions based on the particulars of my collection.

>11 carolusmagnus: chiming in late.

I started with DDC just because most of my books came from the booksale table at the library and they had the spine labels. So for fic, I just did alphabet and sorted out the children's onto their own shelf. (if I had an author like B. Mertz who also did a couple of nonfic, I just added them to her row so they would all be together. I also added biographies of authors to wherever their works were.)

But for nonfic, I tried to follow the spine labels as a starting point. Then I went back and grouped books together that I used together. Like accounting went with math instead of business or hymnals went in religion instead of music.

The biggest thing was though that I made sure to add my own spine label so that I would know where it went on the shelf and then updated it in my LT. I think you could make up whatever worked for you an as long as you labeled and cataloged, then you'd be fine. You can aways adjust things later.

>11 carolusmagnus: In this case I think using MDS and altering when needed would probably be best, but I would use at least 3 digits of MDS, or the most specific available. If you go to the work page of any book (which you can find by clicking the title of a book you have), and then to 'work details' (on the left side of the screen), you will find that most books have specific MDS numbers listed. You can choose the most popular one, which will be at the top, or you can look at all of them and decide which section you/your family would be most likely to look for a particular book in.

http://librarything.com/mds/ can help you in many ways with MDS. You can use it to determine the best MDS for a book that doesn't have a code listed, and you can also use it to familiarise yourself with the numbers and find out where a particular book would be found.

For fiction, you can choose to house it in the 800s if you think that's where you and your family would find it easiest, or you can use a different system for fiction. Dewey has fiction sorted by the nationality of the author, so even many libraries that use Dewey for non-fiction do something else for fiction. Many people separate adult fiction from children's fiction, but you can decide if that works for your family and how far you want to go. Do you just want adult and children's? Are board boards separate from chapter books? What about teen/YA books? and so on. You could sort by last name, or year of publication, by genre, or by the person who is most likely to read it: this bookcase is the stuff I mostly read and family isn't super interested in, this one is the stuff spouse and I both enjoy, this is the stuff spouse likes that I'm not really interested in, this is stuff our whole family has in common, here is the stuff child 1 likes that no one else is really that interested in, this is stuff all the children enjoy but the adults aren't too excited about, etc.

I went through this years ago with over 2,500 books. Eventually, everything got sorted by whole-number Dewey and last name of the author.
There was a whole process of getting the Dewey number and measuring the dimensions and weight of each book, but I'll leave out those details. Just this: Before I moved a single book, I knew which the room, bookcase, shelf and neighboring books a book would end up on/with. Complete major sections of the system stored in a single room - all over the house. With that information, it took all of two hours to get everything in order.

It also makes sense to have separate shelves for oversize books.

>14 WholeHouseLibrary: I was thinking of doing a similar optimization based on size but am not sure I want to commit to doing measurements of all the books so I think it will end up being more iterative... I'm also leaning towards whole-number Dewey + a dewey lower number in some cases for nonfiction.

>15 MarthaJeanne: Yes agreed, I need to consider the larger books as part of this.

My library is mostly fiction (which I shelve alphabetically by author and then by series; kids' books go in their room) so my non-fiction/ reference section is quite small and most of that is cook books. I happen to have a label machine for which I can get tapes in several colours. I assigned a colour to each MDS group number (eg red for 4 - Languages) and labelled each book with its full MDS number on that colour tape (though I did do the cookbooks in more detail). I didn't necessarily shelve the groups in MDS order though I did keep the same groupings together (and kept the MDS order within the groups) and sometimes combined groups that, for me, are related. The colours make it easy for me to see where to reshelve a book.

Mind you, most of my non-fiction (except for the cook books) fit in one cupboard and I have enough space on each shelf to put a different section on each end and labelling 2,300 books might be rather daunting but maybe that will help give you some ideas.

I banged them (6k) on the shelves any old how (i.e. according to my internal headspace, and putting them in physical rooms where I'm most likely to need them, also sorting a lot by physical size). Then I used this lovely little database here to allow me to find them again. I used "Other call number system" for a shelf / storage box location.

I don't need to do some of the things that older, larger libraries used to need to do, or still do.

I do need to do some things (shelving by height, because I need the packing density) that would horrify real libraries.

>18 Andy_Dingley: Like you, I can generally find my shelved books from memory. But rather than using 'Other call number' for the boxed books, I use the box numbers as tags: 'Blwch 001', etc. That way I know I can call up the contents of any box.

You're probably going to say that you can do the same with 'Other call number', if that is the case. I can see that your way keeps the information private, as it's within 'Your book information'.

>18 Andy_Dingley: The Rathaus library here in Vienna has all the books sorted by height and accession dare. When a new book arrives it gets a number and is assigned a shelf by height, going in at the end of that shelf until it is filled, and a new shelf is started for that height. Since the stacks are closed, you fill in that data from the catalogue, and in an hour or so it is brought to you. At the end of your session you give the book back and say whether it should be held for you.

On a tour we were allowed to see the stacks, and the density of the books is amazing. Each shelf is really full up to a millimeter or two of the shelf above it. 'Real libraries' use different methods depending on their needs.

My husband reminds me that the historical books in the 'Prunksaal' of the National Library are also shelved by size. In this case the large books are on the bottom shelf, and the smallest books are way up on the top shelves which have to be reached by ladders. Since those big volumes are very heavy, you would not want to carry them up and sown the ladders. In this case the books are in the special bindings of whichever prince or emperor they belonged to, and the whole set of rooms is very impressive. Do give it a look-see if you ever get to Vienna. (We also had a tour there, and the guide pilled a book from the shelf, and had ME hold it while he leafed through it showing off the beautiful illustrations. Be calm my heart.)

I use the tags as tags (and extensively). As a database architect, using them for box locations too would horrify me.

I thought that the idea of tags was that they could be anything so why should any particular usage be horrifying?

What everybody else said about keying the system to where you expect to find a book is the key - I had mine my LoC for awhile, but that was mostly because I wanted to learn the system (and it helped!) than to help me find books. Right now I have a custom call number system I'm working on though it's perpetually a mess because I buy books faster than I can shelve them lately....

But one key is that for a personal system, there's really no reason to key down any farther than what shelf it's on. Shelves are designed to be about the length that a human eye can easily scan in one glance, so as long as you know what shelf to look on and you have a vague idea what the book looks like, it's no faster to have them all carefully ordered than to just have them on the right shelf. (I tend to order individual shelves based on aesthetics, but what's on each shelf is by topics that make sense mostly to me, and I picked my topics so there's one or two shelves per topic.)

I do have some optimizing by size but when your library gets to a certain level of out of control you kind of have to do that, you can wait until you have to.

>21 Andy_Dingley: "I use the tags as tags (and extensively). As a database architect, using them for box locations too would horrify me".

Then I'm afraid you're likely to be disappointed with your fellow LibraryThingers. The tag "Box 1", including variants and translations, is used by over 43,200 members.

Not that I'd like to try moving some of those boxes without a pallet truck. The largest Box 1 is readafew's, containing 193 titles, while the largest box I noticed off-hand is lisa211's Box 5, with 395! What is that, a tea chest?!?

>24 Cynfelyn: A large moving box from Uhaul is 18" x 18" x 24". I bet you could fit a loooot of Animorphs books in there, but I haven't drunk enough coffee to do the math. (Someone once donated a box that size full of Playboy magazines to my library, which was so heavy that it immediately burst open, and left staff members carrying armfuls of smut back and forth through the library.)

For my personal print library (~1200 books), I have it physically organized largely like you do here. Fiction makes up a large portion of mine, so I have that subdivided into large genres, and thereunder by author: general fiction, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, horror, and then a couple hyper-specific genres that are my favorite things to read: takes place on a boat, and urban fantasy police procedurals. This lets me browse my fiction shelves based on what I'm in the mood to read. Graphic novels are kept together on a high shelf so that my nephews can't reach them. Nonfiction is grouped topically, but I only have a couple hundred of those. I haven't bothered creating any metadata about location in librarything, because the system is just for me and doesn't need to be communicated to anyone else.

For my mom's library (~4000 books total), nonfiction is sorted into broad categories like social science, science and nature, history, biography, etc. They're grouped together on their own shelves, but they're mostly sorted by size to maximize the amount that can fit. Oh, and we built a dedicated shelf to hold 'coffee-table' sized books lying flat. Finding a specific book does require you stand there and scan all the spines, but honestly that's part of the fun. Mom made me help with organizing since I'm a librarian, but it wasn't worth the amount of time and effort to get into more detailed classification and call numbers, because the only one doing the retrieving is her.

You'd be surprised how many mass market paperbacks will fit in a not too huge box - I apparently have 91 in a perfectly normal-sized under-the-bed box, three rows of 30. (And I do actually have a steamer trunk that's over twice the size, but it's being used for CDs that aren't in LT.)

>2 lesmel: That's what I do. I do have fiction and drama combined, although not poetry (at the moment!) and everything else is arranged by topic.