Location, location, location

I would like to use library thing to organize my books. How can I assign each book a location or call number so I know where to find it?

A lot of people use tags to indicate the location of their books.

There are fields for Dewey Decimal, for Library of Congress Classification, and for 'Other Call number', which can be whatever works for you.

The first two are often available if you chose a library source or if somebody else has chosen a library source for that work.

>2 abbottthomas: Correct. And perfectly OK to do. Personally, I prefer using the Other Call Number field, as that doesn't bleed over to other people's books. Go to a book you have entered, click Edit your book to the left and scroll down on that page.

I use collections for certain broad categories of location: "boxed," "pamphlet boxes," "office."

A lot depends on how specific you want your location to be - if it's just something like 'living room' or 'guest bedroom', tags or collections would work well. If it's more like "this shelf, this bookcase, this room" in some sort of code, Other Call Number would probably be your best option.

I use other call number.

I've used two different systems that have worked well for me:

1. Letter-number tags (e.g., A1 or J9), where the letter indicates a bookcase and the number indicates a shelf on that bookcase. This had the benefit of not requiring the books to be in any particular order, but it was hard to keep up with when I needed to shift things around on the shelves. If I were still using this system, I would probably experiment with "Other Call Number" instead of tags, for the reason stated by >4 anglemark:.

2. Collections for each broad category of books (e.g., American Literature or Speculative Fiction). Each of these categories is large enough (several dozen books each) that I can easily keep track of where the category is physically located, and I shelve the books alphabetically by author's name within each category (or chronological for the historical categories). I started using this system when we moved to a new house earlier this year, and while I've lost some specificity, it's been more flexible and, I think, makes for happier browsing.

I'm sure there are dozens of other options--I'm just adding these as a few examples of what is possible.

>8 JacobHolt: Your current method brings us round to the vexed question of how one shelves one’s books in the first place. I see top of the list of books we share is The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust: is that shelved alongside your copies of Remembrance of Things Past or with Literary Criticism? If you bother about first editions do they all sit together or rather lurk with their authors’ scruffy paperbacks?

The nice thing about your system is that you get to remind yourself of other books that have temporarily slipped your mind.

I forgot where i shelved my Proust, but the smell of a musty book brought it all flooding back.

>9 abbottthomas: I don’t think there’s a good answer to that: you can be a purist and say “fiction is fiction” and everything else goes in lit-crit, biography, or whatever; you can do it like university libraries and not have a fiction section at all, but file everything under “French literature”; or like our city library, that puts Proust and books-about-Proust in “French literature” but Simenon in “fiction in French” (or “fiction in Dutch” as the case may be) and Simenon bios in “French literature”; or you can be even more gloriously inconsistent...

My “books about PG Wodehouse” (about 2/3 of a shelf) were in the fiction section, but logic and pressure of space made me move them to the literature section, and now they seem to be on a shelf of their own in, between “maps” and “railways” that happened to fall free at the right moment when I was trying to make space on the literature shelves...

There’s a similar problem when you have studies of other writers written by a writer you’re interested in for his/her own sake: do you file them by subject or by author? That’s why we have catalogues, of course!

>10 MrAndrew: That sort of post has me reaching for the 'Like' button.

>11 thorold: I suppose your city library should be seen as guilty of 'snobisme' or whatever that is in Dutch. Proust is long dead, Simenon less so but just as permanently. Proust's books still sell well after all this time, so do Simenon's. Both are considered by many to be great writers and, I expect, still feature in Masters' and doctorate theses from respectable universities. So, what makes one Literature and the other not? Can't just be murder. (Candidates should write on one side of the paper only)

Looking up I see that Len Deighton's Bomber (truthful but not fact) is alongside his Fighter (history) on a WW2 shelf - The Ipcress File, etc. are in another room.

It's all part of The Joy of Books!

>12 abbottthomas: In all fairness, I expect the librarian would try to claim that it’s not a value-judgment, just a pragmatic observation of what type of users are most likely to want that particular book — students or general readers.

Anyway, there’s always Meurtre chez Tante Léonie...

>12 abbottthomas: In DDC/MDS, {language/nationality} Fiction is one of several subcategories of {language/nationality} Literature. Other subcategories of Literature include Poetry, Drama (plays), Essays, etc. Either everything that can be placed in one of those third-digit subcategories should be placed in one of them, or everything should be kept at the higher level of {language/nationality} Literature - or even just use the top-level 800 category for all languages/nationalities of literature without subdividing any further (alphabetizing at that point). ('Everything in 800 without subcategorizing' is equivalent to what libraries that just use "FIC" are doing.)

It really wasn't intended to be a "Fiction vs Literature" thing like some public/city libraries seem to misuse the categories, to segregate the 'classy' "literature" from the 'lower-class' "fiction". I've seen several previous threads in years past that were debating about the use of Fiction vs Literature, where this wasn't explained. Each person can certainly organize according to your own personal preferences, but for anyone who's been concerned about how it 'should' work in Dewey-esque systems, I hope this helps. :)

>15 Opteryx: Thanks for that. I am firmly of the 'personal preference' school, but then I haven't got enough shelves to do anything more structured.

>9 abbottthomas: Yes, those kinds of "vexed questions" are exactly the downside of my current system. I sort of resolved it by not creating a category for Literary Criticism in the first place--all Proust-related books go next to Proust's own works, all Shakespeare-related books next to his own works, etc. I don't have enough books of pure literary criticism for a separate category, so something like Anatomy of Criticism is shelved alphabetically under Northrop Frye's name in American Literature. I do have a separate category for poetry, but Proust's poetry goes in the World Literature category next to Proust's other works. My biggest category problem right now is William Morris--his works are scattered across Lyric Poetry, Architecture and Design, and Speculative Fiction.

And currently the first editions and paperbacks are all mixed together. Separating the "nice" books from the "merely serviceable" paperbacks was really the only advantage (and was the main guiding principle) of my previous organization system. How do you deal with this issue on your shelves?

>10 MrAndrew:

https://www.openculture.com/2020/11/powells-books-unveils-a-new-perfume-that-sme...

>16 abbottthomas: I too have a severe shelf shortage, so I'm doing the organizing virtually that I can't do physically. :) At some point in the distant future, I hope to have enough space to unbox all the books.

>16 abbottthomas: and >19 Opteryx: Tell me about the shelf shortage thing. I spent way to much money digitizing slides to free up a shelf.

Next I'm moving books into boxes with a bit of silica in them to eliminate any moisture issues. These are my wife's books and she hasn't looked at them in years. I took a picture of the cover before they went in. . .another shelf.

Decoys and stuff onto a shelf I can't reach at all . . another shelf (that's 3).

I weeded books from my collection that I now know I will never read and too many duplicates from my BLT (? . . . before LibraryThing) days. I did find them all a home.

Next was a bookcase in our upstairs bedroom we use as a warehouse these days. . . . you get the idea.

Next I shuffle books on shelves to make sure they fit better. As soon as I do that, I jump into LT and change the location. . . I'm very unoriginal. . every shelf has a unique number.

Now I'm plowing through boxes in that upstairs bedroom where the books are already in LT but they need a home. I fit them in and move some others. . .and on it goes . . .it's called rearranging the deck chairs on the T. . . or your sinking ship of choice.

>17 JacobHolt: Most of my first editions and other 'nice' copies are shelved at eye level away from the run-of-the-mill editions by the same author. This has at least something to do with liking books of the same size shelved together.

>19 Opteryx: "a severe shelf shortage"

LOL! I'll be using that term myself from now on.

Having read most messages posted about this subject could a programmer (for LibraryThing) not create a field exactly for this and have an update for us to use?

We have a field exactly for this. "Other call number".