Coffee Klatch

Recently I blogged about LibraryThing on my BiblioTech Web blog, talking about how libraries could make use of this most excellent resource. (If you want to learn more about LibraryThing, read that post or the one I wrote last year about it.)

I can’t say enough good things about LibraryThing. If you haven’t checked it out, you really need to: LibraryThing.com

Getting beyond that, once you’ve entered your books in LibraryThing, you MAY want to actually assign call numbers to them, using either Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal Classification. I recommend Dewey for personal libraries, since it’s easier to use for smaller libraries. LibraryThing will show you the call numbers that other people are using, allowing you to use those for your own.

But if you’re like me, you want to do it YOUR way. For example, I USED to label my fiction books with small white labels with FIC and the first three letters of the author’s name. As I was looking at all my fiction (roughly 400 books, I think–I’m still not done entering them all), I thought that maybe I should make it the first FOUR letters of the author’s last name. But then, with using LibraryThing, I thought maybe I’d use something like FICTION ADAMS for the fiction books.

Then arose the perennial question. What about literature? Do I put Dickens under “Literature” or under “Fiction?” It’s really both. My decision: use Dewey the way it was made. Pulling fiction books out into a separate collection is what libraries often do to make it easier to access. But not all do, and there’s no reason I need to. Instead, I’ll use 813 for American Fiction and that will encompass most of my general fiction books.

Next question: If you use 813 for fiction, you need to have information after the decimal (thus the name) to differentiate between the hundreds of books. Enter the Cutter Number. Basically, a Cutter Number is used to designate an author or other information within the call number of the book. It involves using the first letter of the author’s last name, followed by several numbers representing the remaining letters. What results is a numerical representation of the author’s name. For example, A2145 = Adams, John and O5871 = O’Neill, Edward.

Using a Cutter Number means you can have separate numbers for each author, making it easier to alphabetize and track your books. But that can be a lot of work, creating numbers for each author. Wouldn’t it be easier and more useful to have some program create them for you? LibraryThing doesn’t do it (that would be TOO awesome!). So where do you turn?

OCLC is a worldwide library cooperative that is one of the biggest authorities on library-related topics. They have a tiny little program available for free (noncommercial use only) that’s called the Dewey Cutter Program. You type in (or copy & paste) the author’s name and it gives you the Cutter Number. Then you can easily copy and paste it into LibraryThing. Pretty cool, eh?

You can do the same thing for other forms of literature or for all your library. Whatever you like. After all, it is YOUR library. There are plenty of breakdowns of the Dewey Decimal Classification system online. Here are two good ones.

If what you’ve got is mostly English-language material, 813 is American Fiction, 823 is English Fiction, 811 is American Poetry, 821 is English Poetry, etc. There are other numbers for drama, essays, speeches, etc. Here’s a quick reference chart:

You probably don’t need to subdivide within these categories. A Cutter Number is probably sufficient. And if you want to look outside this area at other books (particularly nonfiction), you can view the book title in LibraryThing and click “Find in a Library,” which will search for the book in OpenWorldCat.

And there you go! Your own personal CATALOGED library! Now you can use LibraryThing to connect with other people who have similar interests (and who are also already interested in books) and to find new books or authors that you haven’t tried yet. What fun!

Current music: Rachmaninoff: Vespers

[tags]LibraryThing, libraries, books, technology, cataloging, dewey decimal, DDC[/tags]