ephemera

We are a small library attached to a fiber arts guild. Our library has quite a few items that are not books but rather articles kept in plastic sleeves and swatch collections, DVDs and VHS tapes. What are some other libraries here doing to document those and make them available to their patrons?

I will be curious to see what others have to say, but you may be able to find some existing discussions on this sort of thing by filtering Talk results in the "Search LibraryThing" site search, or you may also want to post your question in the "Librarians who LibraryThing" Group: https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/78/Librarians-who-LibraryThing

Also, a couple of extra tips/recs (from an LT staffer, not a librarian):
- First, I would recommend importing your non-book materials using your own custom data and following our sample .csv import file (see the Help page here: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/HelpThing:Import). Keep in mind that you will need to use LibraryThing's bookish fields (title, author, etc.) to fit your needs. For example, entering the name of the swatch sample in the "Title" field and so forth, etc.
- We also have a "Media" field that you can apply to your items as needed: see our blog post for cataloging music and movies for more information: https://blog.librarything.com/main/2015/09/music-and-movie-cataloging-but-were-s...

Hope this helps!

>1 SCTAG: Take a look at my library. I have LOTS of ephemera - all paper. Lot of Railroad stuff and Chester County History stuff. The point about "bookish" is correct. One you decide what you want to put in the author field, for example, be consistent.