I’ve been toying with the idea of working on our library again. It’s always in the back of my mind, but today I’ve decided to play around with determining protocol concerning book labels. So far, about the only protocols I have decided upon concern the placement of labels on the books. This being a personal collection, I do not have to follow the usual or common guidelines of putting labels on the spines or on the front cover for ease of use by patrons. I have decided that the back of the book in the lower right-hand corner would be the best for our needs because in most cases, I will simply be covering up the UPC. I don’t think we’re going to mess with barcodes of either Codabar or Code 39 systems because I don’t plan on getting a barcode reader (They’re around $100-$150 after all.) and so barcode placement isn’t a concern–just the labels themselves.

Ian has expressed concern for covering up information such as book descriptions on fiction books, and I think I’ve come up with a way to nulify that potential problem. Seeing as how fiction books are generally shelved by the author’s last name one way or another, the label doesn’t really have to be on the outside of the book in order to shelve it. Therefore, labels on fiction books will go on the inside cover of the book in the upper right-hand corner so as to avoid it being covered up by dust jackets. I haven’t made a determination on getting plastic dust jacket covers yet, but that may be in the future of our collection as well someday. So non-fiction books will get a label in the lower right-hand corner of the back cover and fiction books will get a label in the upper right-hand corner of the inside of the front cover. Joy!

A few other aspects of the labels haven’t been determined such as font (both lettering style and size), but I have decided that I’m not going to include such distinctions as “Browse” for books typically in browsing sections or “Ref” for books typically found in reference sections. There’s really no need for such a small collection which does not get checked in or out with such categorical restrictions. By not including distinctions such as “Browse” or “Reft,” the labels can be shorter. This is useful as I have several journals which makes for longer labels due to including volume information. The labels, following the Library of Congress Cataloguing System, will be about four lines long on average, so shaving off a superfluous line or two is important. The width is also important but more or less standard across label types so I would understandably have less control over width as height. Luckily, library supplies companies such as Demco and Gaylord have a wide variety of labels in many sizes.

So since the size of the label shouldn’t be much of a problem either for font or function, the type of label should be considered more. It would be wonderful to have an actual label maker like the ones used in libraries, but we do have two pretty good printers which are more than up to the task of printing off sheets of labels as well. That does limit the type of label some, but not much. There’s a huge distinction between foil-back and paper labels, and whether to use one over the other is something I haven’t determined yet. I do plan on buying clear label covers, however, to ensure that the labels remain clear and free from dirt as well as to keep them on the books longer. So foil-back or paper–a decision yet to come.

It was while considering the labels and the method of printing them off that I decided I would want a document or file containing all of the labels so that if a label were to fall off, I could easily print another to replace it. This, of course, would mean that I would also need records of the author, title, and like information in order to be able to keep track of which label goes to which book. The thought of my own personal database came back–another project that has been stewing in my mind a while–and I asked Ian if he could come up with a database to meet our needs. I wouldn’t need nearly as many entries as a usual MARC record, but I would want entries for both author and book separately as well as multiple entries for authors as per usual MARC record standards. Book titles would also need special consideration concerning articles and subtitles. Further specialization would include the availability of individual short stories or works included in an anthology, but I don’t believe anything that grandiose is necessary. It would simply be nice to have on-line access to what books we own via title, author, copyright date, and publisher. It’s an exciting undertaking, and I’m sure Ian can come up with a database to do anything I need. My own personal catalogue. How wonderful!

So the library is still a work in progess and will be for some time. A project I may begin this up-coming week which requires no additional supplies (or very few) will be making boxes to contain the more fragile books in our collection such as a French novel from 1935 which has no real cover or an over-sized book on French architecture whose pages are frail and coming loose–a preservation project I haven’t the tools or experience to deal with yet, but will someday. I’m happy to be coming up with my own protocols for our collection as it affords me the opportunity to study the process–the options, advantages, disadvantages, and difficulties–of creating a standard system. I think that the decisions I have made will make sense for our collection, and I’m looking forward to implementing them. I really ought to document the standards once I have them for the future or in case I decide one day to change them. This is more fun than it should be. ^_^