As part of the de-messification of the upstairs, when I put away my
books, I catalog them. This is something everybody with a librarian
bone in their body thinks about, and then doesn’t do.
However, now that we have technology, someone has made it easy. Tellico is a program that
lets you catalog any kind of collection, but for books, all you have
ot do is enter the ISBN, and it searches the web and fills in all the
information Amazon or somebody has for the book. So to catalog one
book, in general you enter the ISBN, click “search”, and then click
“add entry”. If for some reason the ISBN printed in the book doesn’t
match the ISBN in the databases (which it didn’t for “Horse Heaven” by
Jane Smiley), or the book is old enough to not have an ISBN printed in
it, you can of course enter information in the conventional way, or
search on the title.
This is still just a novelty, since only the books that were
cluttering up the computer desk and most of the ones that were
cluttering up the bedside table have been entered yet. You can see
the current catalog at mybooks.html.
But it should eventually be a major contribution to the
de-messification, since my theory is that instead of buying more
bookcases or throwing out lots of books, I should put books that I
want to keep but don’t expect to read in boxes, and I’ll be able to
enter the box ID into the catalog.
I’m actually reading most out-of-copyright stuff on the PDA instead
of in hardcopy, so having the dead tree version clutter up my shelves
is a nuisance. But if the PDA were to die in the middle of one that I
have a hard copy of, I’d be seriously annoyed.
Tellico has interfaces for lots of kinds of collections, such as
videos and stamps and wine. I’m looking forward to doing the CD’s. I
understand that all you do is put the CD into you computer, and it
gets all the information straight off the CD.
LayMusic.org 