Our Personal Library

As a fledgling librarian, I think it’s about time for me to share with you all, fair readers, my own personal library. I feel confident in assuming that many of you have glanced at our library through the link above, and so you have a good idea of the titles we have. At last glance, we are at about 230 volumes in our growing library, covering a wide range of topics, but with special emphasis in:
United States History
Texas History
Libraries
Psychology/Neurology
Photography
Architecture
We prefer to purchase non-fiction works, as you can tell. However, today I write about the classification (and a few other librarian-related items) of our library.

Logically, the first step is the acquisition of new titles. I recently wrote about my new acquisitions for this year, but for the most part we go abut purchasing books as follows. First, we frequently browse our local booksellers and if something looks “interesting” to us, then we put it in our respective Amazon Wishlist. Usually, when we get some gift cash, or have run out of books to read, we begin carving out an order from Amazon, either new from them, or used from their marketplace sellers. I would love to spend my money locally, but Amazon is so much cheaper that it really makes very little sense for us to buy locally.

After receiving the books we ordered, they go into our catalog. (Come on, you knew we would have a catalog, right?) For our catalog, we use a pretty decent program called Delicious Library. It has a great interface, but for me (the librarian part of me), the descriptive bibliographic data is a bit lacking, as it scrapes from Amazon. Amazon’s metadata about older, or out-of-print books is pretty lacking, so I end up creating a fair amount of that metadata myself - not a major problem, but it could be easily corrected. After creating a record for the item, the new item is placed either on mine or Jen’s “To-Read” shelf in Delicious Library

As for the books themselves, they are stored in three distinct areas: our bookshelves in our living room, the lowest shelf in our built-in in the dining room, and our bookshelf in the dining room. Really, size determines where these books go, most books in the living room, larger books in the built-in, and the largest books on the bookshelf. The books (especially those in the living room) are sorted according to what their subject seems to be, and within those subjects, they are sorted alphabetically by the last name of the author.

After the few remaining Amazon books come in from our recent order, I will be photographing and uploading images of our library so that you get a better idea of what I am talking about - and the photos will be linked to and from here.

Hope you liked the little tour!