Home library catalog: a book inventory that stays on your shelf

How to catalogue books at home

1. Decide on your shelf names first. A short code for room, bookcase and shelf, such as “Study B3” for the third shelf of bookcase B, is enough to find any book. Write the codes on the shelves if it helps.
2. Start with one shelf. Take the books down a few at a time, add each, and put them back in order. A shelf of 25 books is a satisfying evening; a whole house is a winter project.
3. Find the ISBN on the back cover above the barcode or on the copyright page. The International ISBN Agency’s manual says the ISBN is printed with the letters “ISBN” in front. Older books, and many small-press ones, have none; leave the box empty.
4. Type the author either way. “Jane Austen” and “Austen, Jane” both sort under A, because the catalogue files by surname.
5. Record loans as you lend. A name and a date are enough; the list shows how many days each book has been away.
6. Tag sparingly. A few tags you’ll actually search for, such as “signed”, “to read” or “first edition”, beat a long list.
7. Export a CSV now and then. It is your backup and opens in any spreadsheet.

What the catalogue keeps, and where

Each book has a title (the only required field), an author, an optional ISBN, a shelf, a borrower and loan date, and tags. The ISBN box uses the same check as the ISBN converter, so a mistyped digit is caught before it is saved, and a ten-digit ISBN is stored in its 13-digit form so the same book never appears twice under two numbers. Everything is saved in your browser’s local storage on this device. There is no account, no server and no lookup service, which is why it cannot fill in a title from an ISBN: that would mean sending your ISBNs to someone else’s database.

Local storage belongs to one browser on one device. It survives closing the tab, but not clearing your browsing data, and a private window forgets it when you close it. That is the reason for the Export CSV button: keep a copy somewhere safe, and import it on another device to carry on there.

The CSV format

The export has one row per book and the columns Title, Author, ISBN, Shelf, Loaned to, Loan date and Tags, with tags separated by semicolons. It opens directly in Excel, Numbers, LibreOffice or Google Sheets. Import accepts the same columns, and also common alternatives such as Book Title, ISBN-10, Location, Borrower, Date lent or Genre, separated by commas, semicolons or tabs. Rows without a title, with an invalid ISBN or with a loan date that isn’t a real date are skipped and listed so you can fix them. One detail: a title beginning with =, +, − or @ could be run as a formula by a spreadsheet, so the export puts an apostrophe in front of it, and the import takes it off again.

A worked example

Say you lend Moby-Dick to Sam on 30 September 2026. Find the book in the list, choose Edit, type Sam in Loaned to, pick the date, and save. Sorting by “On loan first” then puts it near the top, with the number of days it has been away. When Sam returns it, edit the book again and clear both loan boxes. Searching “fiction landing” finds every book tagged fiction on the landing shelf, because each word must match somewhere in the record.

Common mistakes

• Never exporting. One cleared browser and the catalogue is gone. Export after each cataloguing session.
• Cataloguing in a private window. It all disappears when the window closes.
• Changing shelf names halfway. “Study B3” and “study, case B, shelf 3” sort apart. Pick one style.
• Typing an ISBN-10 for one copy and an ISBN-13 for another. The catalogue stores both as 13 digits, so they match; a spreadsheet you keep by hand wouldn’t.
• Cataloguing before sorting. Choose how the shelves are ordered first with the shelving schemes, so each book’s shelf is right the first time.

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