Organizing My Books

I thought I would share this book organization project

For the last several months I have been a busy beaver cataloging all my books that have seem to multiply. Of course, if I would stop ordering, this would not be the case. So, it was time to catalog and stop ordering the same book twice or not finding them at all within the masses of books.

I would like to share with you how I went about doing this. I first categorized all the books. For example: Beading, Bead Embroidery, Jewelry, Wire Works (Green), Crafts (Black), Doll Making (Purple/Blue), Dover Books (Yellow/Blue), Drawing (Red/Purple), Fashions (Yellow/Red) etc. I can tell you I had books everywhere. I didn’t realize how many books I had and had several doubles too.

I also color coded all the books according to the category with large adhesive dots which I cut in half when there were two colors for the category. Now, from there I set-up a “Home Library” folder in Excel and logged all the books within their own file. I set-up the file with these headings: Title, Author, Category, Cover Type, Condition, Notes. You can go further and add the ISBN# but I had so many books to enter that I felt this would be enough for me.

Now I can go to my computer and check before I order a book and if I pull a book out I just have to look at the color dots and they go back into that section. I generally don’t lend my books but if that would happen I can make a note for that book on my computer plus put a post it note in that grouping to remind me one is missing.

I know this seems like a big undertaking but I just set it up that I would do so many over a weekend. It feels good to have the books in order and in place. I hope this helps someone that is dealing with lots of books to keep in order
Until the next time….