I’m going to be completely honest and admit my library room, at the present moment anyways, really has no rhyme or reason in terms of organization. I have accumulated so much over the years that it has essentially become “place it wherever you can find room.” No real theme in regards to which books are on which bookshelf. But I’m in there so often I can pinpoint exactly where each book is on the shelves just from memory.
One day, when I have the time, I’d like to take on a little project and completely re-organize the entire collection. Perhaps by theme, maybe even publication year if I really want to get specific.
My advice if you’re trying to organize your stuff and make it look as visually satisfying as possible, place the hardcovers together, and the paperbacks together while keeping size in mind. It just looks nicer if similarly sized books are kept together. You may also want to separate the hockey history books from the autobiography/biography titles to make it easier to keep track of where each book is placed on your shelves.
As for cataloging, I actually keep a folder on my PC with many sub folders inside that has pictures of every single item I own. Every time I receive a new book, before I place it in the library room I snap a picture of the cover. This, for me anyways, has been the easiest way to keep track of my collection over the years. Rather than just words on a spreadsheet I have a photo of each book cover along with the title of the book as the file name. Now, the downside of course is that this can be time consuming if you have a large collection, having to snap photos of each item. But it’s worth it, IMO.
On another note, that’s the main reason why I created the facebook page for my collection - a further way to catalogue the items I own. I took those photos that I had set up on my PC, created individual photo albums for all the books, THN issues etc..and made sure they were organized. I thought it could be useful for other collectors and hockey book readers as well, and turns out I was right, as the page now has over 600 followers (which is more than I could have imagined) and growing, and I’m often receiving messages from people who discovered some books they didn’t even know existed and they went ahead and found copies for themselves.
So it terms of cataloguing, my advice would be going the picture route.
