A delight
A book is a source of information and delight. We read books to learn and to enjoy, to escape. There are as many ways to organise books as there are to organise information.
A thing
A book is also a thing, with a size, colours, even scents. We place books on the shelves of a bookcase or pile them up on about any other flat surface. The big books on the bottom shelves, the coffee table books unsuprisingly on the coffee table. Reference books within an arm's length of the desk, cook books near the kitchen.
The problem
Everyone who has more than a few books knows that it is impossible to order books in a satisfactory way. If you order books by content, physics will strike and put one very tall book on each of your shelves. If however you go for a physical ordering and put large next to large, blue opposite red, leather bound separated from paperback, you will find your dictionary in one corner of the library and your thesaurus in the other.
The solution
The solution is of course a catalog. With a catalog, you can choose one kind of ordering in the real world, and any kind of classification on paper. The catalog can contain a list of books by author, so you can quickly see which Ruth Rendell's are still missing from your collection. When you want to know where the Ruth Rendell's are that you do have, the catalog has a reference to the real world ordering.
Replaced
As with most filing cabinets, the type that contains a book catalog has been replaced by a computer, or more precisely, by a computer running catalog software. Biblio is such software. Biblio provides a flexible classification system, with categories and keywords. Biblio allows you to print a catalog to make it easier to check that your data reflects the real world. Biblio helps organise your book collection.
© 2007 Marbo
