Legal Research

Organizing your home library

By Jason

The Mental Floss Blog has a good post today on organizing your home library. Hopefully, many librarians are familiar with the tools and issues from this post. It’s still nice to see links to LibraryThing which has made quite a splash in the library community.

But it’s worth reading through the comments to see the creative solutions, organization schemes, and shelving options people have come up with.

My wife often makes fun of me because our library is not organized in any meaningful way. But as someone who deals with LC classification and cataloging issues on a daily basis in my job, I would like to have a home library with a more creative system, a system more personally meaningful because I am the main user. I haven’t organized my home library because I have yet to find that system (although I haven’t devoted as much time to it as I should).

This whole discussion reminds me of the story I read in library school about a man who was asked why The Communist Manifesto was shelved next to Alice in Wonderland in his personal library. He answered that they were both works of fantasy or something to that effect. The point here being that I would like to come up with a classification meaningful to me, and just haven’t done it yet. But maybe this post and comments at the Mental Floss Blog will inspire me.

Full post as published by Jason the Content Librarian on December 17, 2007 (boomark / email).