Tags

Organizing Books

A year ago, I set out to find a used bookshelf. I have a large set of bookshelves in my house but they are in a different room away from my genealogy space. Naturally, I needed to find storage for genealogy-related books to keep in the same room that I was planning on working.

Last summer, the bookshelf was secured.

Grandma’s books were brought out of storage and aired out.

My own books were brought from the back of the house to their new space in front.

Organizing everything was the next logical step. It doesn’t help to have your books all in one place if you can’t find what you’re looking for. Dewey and his decimal system wasn’t going to help me out, so I opted to place them how I needed it to make sense to me.

  • The books that I need most accessible for upcoming classes
  • Additional resource materials
  • Specific surname family related books
  • Books specific to Salem and the witchcraft trials
  • Family archives – funeral books, yearbooks, etc…

My grandfather’s second wife was the family historian for years and had collected a number of publications that she had purchased through local history and genealogical societies, and she had passed those down to me. However, many books were outdated, had since become digitized, or I simply had no use for those that had noted her own 5th and 6th generation family members. Thankfully, I was able to locate and contact the local history centers for those publications and donated them back to their library.

Lastly, the Genealogy Guys blog recommended a cataloging process called LibraryThing, which appears to be free at this point for the 60-70 books that I will be adding in at this point. Adding books is easy enough – just enter some title words, the author, an ISBN number into the Search box on the “Add books” page. Or you can use the app and use your device to read the ISBN on the book to automatically locate and add it to your catalog of books.

It seems to be a handy tool to have, especially when at a research library or at a bookstore and I see material that has potential to be useful. Do I already have it? Well let me pull up my handy dandy LibraryThing app or the website on my computer, and I can do a quick check to see if I already own it!

~ C.