Ideas For Organizing Home Library

How many times have you been told that there are two ways to organize the books in your library:

-by subject;

-in alphabetical order by author

How about organizing them in a way that’s meaningful to you? If you think about your books as ‘the tall one with the green cover’ or ‘the super fat yellow one’, then organize your books by colour and size. Or organize them alphabetically by title. Mix up your systems until you find the one that’s right for you.

Once you've decided how you want to order your books, you can pick suitable bookshelves. If one of your living rooms is dedicated to your books, you can have a library feel by having only one kind of bookshelf in the room. Or, you can spread your books throughout the house--computer books in the home office, recipe books in the kitchen--and buy shelving appropriate to those rooms.

You can break up your bookshelves by adding either solid or glass doors. The solid doors have the advantage of hiding items that might not look so nice out in the open. For example, I keep binders of information behind solid doors. Glass doors are useful for keeping dust off your shelves and protecting delicate books while having them still be accessible.

I like how this bookcase was organized. Books are sorted by size and other items are strewn throughout the cubbies to keep the space visually interesting.

Cataloguing

You can use a computer application to catalogue all your books. Determine your purpose for doing this. Do you want a complete list so that you can avoid buying duplicates? Perhaps you want to know the value of your rare book collection as a record for the insurance company. It could be a way to track the comings and goings of your books if you like to lend them out. You can also use the software to help you physically locate your books if they are scattered throughout the house.Check out the media page for more ideas on organizing and cataloguing your library.