Genealogists love to collect books. I have a few hundred books here, and I am told that many genealogists have ten times that number or more. Being somewhat organizationally challenged, my books are scattered around my computer room, the living room, the garage, and the basement. I think there may even be a few in the trunk of my car at the moment. I wouldn't be surprised if your books were dispersed in a similar manner.
Of course, there are challenges with keeping and organizing that many volumes. After all, that's a lot of shelf space, and bookcases aren't cheap. For me, the real difficulty is answering the question, "Now where did I put that book?"
There are many possible solutions. Some possible solutions even include the Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Congress classifications (LCC). Would it make sense to use either of those in a home library?
Zack and Mary Grossbart are not genealogists, but they had amassed a sizable book collection of more than 3,500 volumes. They often had difficulty finding a book when they wanted it. Sometimes they couldn't even remember if they HAD a book; so, they would purchase a copy, only to discover later that they already had a copy in their collection.
Zack and Mary found a cheap source of bookcases and started cataloging and filing their books in a manner that minimizes the labor involved. That's not to say there was no manual labor at all; I am sure they spent quite a bit of time handling books. However, Zack found a method of automatically numbering and sorting almost all the books. He used an inexpensive library card catalog program to simplify the task and then added a handheld scanner to simplify the tasks still further.
The result was fewer hours' labor than what would have been required otherwise. They also can look instantly on a computer or even on their handheld computers to quickly find any book in their collection, searching by title, author, topic or other parameters.
You can read Zack Grossbart's description of the process that he and Mary used on his blog at http://zgrossbart.blogspot.com/2007/11/library-problem.html. It makes for interesting reading, especially for those of us who are "organizationally challenged."
