In this system the book Three Seductive Ideas by Jerome Kagan might end up next to The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker because they are both about psychology. This system organizes books into categories and then alphabetically within those categories. This organization makes it difficult to browse books.Īdding categorization to alphabetical sorting can fix that problem. Barrie next to Runner’s World Guide to Injury Prevention by Dagny Scott Barrios. This makes books reasonably easy to find, but puts Peter Pan by J.M. Books are arranged in alphabetical order by title or author’s name. Probably the most common system used for organizing home libraries is alphabetizing. We considered three different systems: alphabetical, Dewey Decimal, and Library of Congress. Some of the systems provide a general outline for where a book should be and other systems are very specific. Most of the systems used to organize books are based on combinations of the author’s name, the title of the book, and the category of the subject matter. Our first task was to decide what system we should use for ordering the books. To complete this project we needed a system to organize all of the books, a way to quickly add books to that system, and a place to store all of the books.Ī Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place The initial cataloging effort can’t take forever.It needs to be easy to maintain the system going forward.The systems needs to handle foreign language books.It needs to be easy to add a book to the system.We got together and came up with a list of requirements for our new system. We also needed to integrate the two separate book collections which represented one of the remaining holdouts of our single lives. We needed a way to store all of our books so they were easily accessible. There were books on random shelves, books on the floor, we were tripping over books when we walked up and down the stairs. We lost books all the time, cursed late into the night digging through piles for that one book we knew must be there, and even bought books only to find that we already owned them. The problem was that we had no idea what books we had or where any of them were. We both have eclectic interests, voracious appetites for knowledge, and a great love of used bookstores. In March of 2006 my wife Mary and I owned about 3,500 books.

Readerware books sort columns