How I Organize My Books

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In my past life, I would like to believe that I am a librarian. I really love to smell (yes smell!), collect and read books. But actually, I only discovered my fascination and addiction toward books when I am in college. Thanks to Bob Ong and his book Ang Paboritong Libro ni Hudas, I became a bookworm.

As years passed by, my book collection grows and so my problem begins. My brothers kept on getting books on my shelf but they are not returning it. I cannot track down what book is missing.

Since I am on vacation for a month now, I finally came up with a solution to my problem. Make my own mini library. I started up looking a free library system at google, but i failed. So I ended up making one in Excel.




I originally wanted to arrange my books according to their call numbers / Dewey Decimal System just like in the big libraries. But I have lots of books that I purchased locally that doesn't have a call number. I even tried researching on how will I assign one to books but I cannot find a tutorial about it. So what I did is I created my own call numbers. Here's the step that I followed:
  1. I encoded the information about my books in the excel file that I created.
  2. I randomly assigned a number for each of my books and sorted them according to their type: Fiction or Non Fiction.
  3. Under fiction, I assigned subtopics such as TRL for thriller, ROM for Romance, etc.
  4. Under non fiction there are REF for reference, INS for inspirational, etc.

Here's an example:

I recently finished reading this book, I Heard That Song Before Before by Mary Higgins Clark. I encoded all the information about this book on my Masterlist: its Number, Type, ISBN, Title, Author, and Publishing Information.

Based on the information that I have encoded, I created a call number. There are 5 columns (refer to photo below):
1st - a little embellishment (mini flowers)
2nd - assigned number
3rd - type of book ( F for Fiction | NF - for Non Fiction)
4th - Publishing Date
5th - my nickname (mia)



By the way, I created the labels using Microsoft Word. I printed the Fiction labels on pink papers; and Non Fiction on Green Papers.

After a week, my mini library was arranged accordingly and clutter free :)



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