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Kicking up Dust - Getting books moving.

Whoever dies with the most book wins!

LibraryThing: free for your personal book collection, 3$/month for a small volunteer-run church library.

Personal Library:

I just discovered that my personal library has about 1300 books. - yes, the kind printed on paper. Much as I love my Logos Library of 4,200 digital resources, digital resources don't let me lend a book to a friend, or pore over the notes in books passed down from the saintly pastors and teachers I've known.

My personal library used to be a little bigger. If anyone reading this remembers that I lent them my Copy of Pete Scazerro's "Emotionally Healthy Spirituality" please let me know! 

The problems with finding a book on my shelf or remembering where I put the note about who borrowed "The Master Plan of Discipleship" - well, the struggle is real!

Church Libraries:

There are great resources gathering dust in most churches. Whether it's edifying fiction, bible commentaries, Group study materials or lifestyle helps, hardly anyone know what's in the library or where to find it. Physical Card catalogues are not my friends, and most volunteer librarians don't have training in the Dewey Decimal  or Library of Congress classification systems.  Imagine if your congregation could click a link on your website and search for the authors and titles they already love! Imagine if the librarian could use their phone or browser to add books, classify and loan them! imagine if patrons could be automatically reminded to bring back that marriage book that 10 couples are waiting for!

Fortunately I have found my friends, LibraryThing.com (iPhone and Android apps available) and  LibraryCat.org

  • TinyCat (short for Tiny Catalogue) is the engine for managing your Patrons (borrowers), and Lending,  and hosting your online catalogue on LibraryCat.org
  • LibraryThing is the cloud-based cataloguing portal that finds all the information for each of your books, lets you organize them so you can find them on your shelves. 

I've just started using this so I have much to discover, but having tried a dozen other approaches, this is the one that has all the things I need. 

Signing up for a free personal library starts at https://www.librarycat.org/signup 

  1. you'll create one account that covers both LibraryThing and TinyCat. Your Username will be the default for your libraries URL slug
  2. you'll be taken to LibraryCat.org/admin, where you will need to establish the Settings for your Catalogue. The defaults are a great starting place.
  3. you can click back to LibraryCatAdmin, and choose Catalogue to see what your (empty) library looks like online at LibraryCat.org/lib/UserName
  4. Now install the app on your phone and sign in to begin entering your library. 

The App for your phone makes entering your books a breeze. -

  1. choose Add to Catalog
  2. if you have a stack of books, with UPC codes, click the UPC scanner button on the upper right, scan, and add them all at once
    1. Don't be worried if the scanner picks up some random things as you move from one book to the next.  
    2. Don't worry if the cover photo doesn't match - 'tis faster to fix that later.
  3. Tip: If you need to manually enter a code (older books) or (horrors) search by author/title, I'd suggest using the microphone instead of your keyboard to read in the ISBN. In manual mode, each book has to be entered separately: tap on the search result, and tap on Add to Collection, near the bottom the the screen.
  4.  when you view  Your Catalog you'll see (by default) your books sorted with  most recently added at the top.

At this point my practice is to switch to my desktop, and librarything.com to go over the books I've just added. It's easier to find a matching cover picture if it needs changing. however if you can't find a match you might find it easier to use your phone app to take a picture and crop it there.

You can explore all you options in LibraryCat and LibraryThing, to customize how you deal with lending, and organizing your books. So far I've added three shelves of books, and tagged them (creatively) Shelf 1, Shelf 2, etc.  so I can find them.  But when I've got the whole library entered, I'm going to export the catalogue to excel, and print out spine labels  with the Dewey Decimal classification that is included in almost every book's catalogue entry! 

here's my office collection so far  https://librarycat.org/lib/bilkie. Yeah, I know, some of these titles need to be put in the restricted section, to keep Harry and Hermoine away from Heresy.