I've got lots of books on lots of topics. They're in bookshelves in different rooms, on tables, and other flat horizontal surfaces. There are some stashed in the garage.
I decided several weeks ago that I really need to sort through them. Some can be traded in to Tidal Wave (a local used book store) but I they don't take all books and I hate to just throw books away.
Here's the 'guest room'. It was one of the kids' rooms, but they're long gone. It's been a storage room on occasion, but we can clear it up if we need it for a guest. I started taking books off the shelves and trying to put them into a more sensible order. It's not that there is no order. There are sections of different public administration related books. But one of the problems with these book shelves is shelf size. I can put related books together until we get some books that are too tall for that particular shelf.
I also started a category I'm calling "books important to how I think." These will be the books I'll most want to keep in the end.
The picture above is a mashup of two pictures - it's basically what that corner of the room looks like, but a little distorted. As you can see, I've been doing my sorting on the bed down there. Another book sorting hazard is that I start reading the books.
So as I was working on this, I thought, I should just google "how to sort home libraries." There's lots of stuff out there. One was just basic sorting ideas - Keep; Give Away, Throw out.
But then I came upon LibraryThing.com. Here's their overview of its uses:
WHAT’S GOOD?
- Catalog your books from Amazon, the Library of Congress and 4,941 other libraries.
- Catalog your movies and music too.
- LibraryThing is entirely free.
- Find new books to read.
- Talk about what you love with other committed bibliophiles.
- Track and lend your books.
- Snag a book from over 2000 early-release books every month.
- Available in many languages:
(others)
My interest was to catalog my books and hopefully be able to sort lists by category. There is a tag section, but I'm not sure how well that will sort things.
It's fairly easy to make a list. You can write down the title and then it shows you a bunch of covers for that book. Then you click on the one that matches yours. It fills out the form for you. But I have a lot of older books - before, say, 1990. Some of my covers didn't show up.
That's when I discovered putting in the ISBN number was a better way to do this.
So I've catalogued 14 books. This could be a long project.
When I looked at my list of 14 books I found one section particularly interesting. It tells you how many people on Librarything have that book. For some books it also tells you how many people are looking for a copy and how many are available. Just in that 14 there were five or six books that people were looking for. So maybe this will be a way to get rid of books.
You can also see how many people near you have catalogued their books on Librarything. Anchorage has a fair number of folks.
So, I have one more long term task for my to do lists.
Photopea
I'd also note that the other day I came across a site called Photopea It's essentially a free Photoshop knock off. My access to Photoshop lapsed a while ago and I've played around with Sketchbook, but Photopea is a much better option. But for those who haven't used Photoshop I'd warn you that it is daunting. Lots to learn. I took two semester long courses where I learned to use it. On the other hand you can google most any question like "How do I make X in Photoshop?" and get a step by step youtube video telling you how. Photopea also says it has versions of other painting/drawing programs.
I used Photopea to merge the two book photos. It took about ten minutes, but then I've used Photoshop a lot.
Black Water
We had maybe an inch of fresh snow this morning and I had a doctor's appointment. I took this photo of the creek flowing through the dorm area at UAA as I was walking back home.
I expected to see a man eating brown bear behind every tree near creek. Was I wrong? ps because of extended drought conditions in iowa, a tub of hobbled up lard, (moi) can nearly jump across rivers and creeks in NW iowa.
ReplyDeleteI know you're joking. As I said, this on the University of Alaska Anchorage campus pretty much in the center of the city. Don't see too many bears there. Besides, they need to be working on their dens. We had another half foot of snow on Thursday. Winter has begun. I am sorry to hear about the drought. I hear it's affecting the Mississippi and that salt water is flowing much father up river than normal.
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