• check existing catalogue entries for errors and improvements
• preliminary pass on all remaining ephemera: extract books, magazines, journals and leave the remainder to the assistants
• catalogue tags and collections
• catalogue and library hints

• going through the huge boxes

• sorting and making space for cards, games, and other weird items
• propaganda sorting, organisation, making space
• cd/dvd/floppydisk sorting, organisation, making space

• archival boxes as needed
• bookends (Michka?)

• übercleanup

We agreed to use the Zotero desktop and mobile apps to make a first pass of cataloguing FoAM's small but esoteric library. Aside from a few annoying glitches, we were able to go through the library quite rapidly, scanning the barcodes with the mobile app while setting aside those items that could not be scanned, or needed special attention (such as all the periodicals, magazines, etc.). A second pass involved manually looking up the ISBN numbers from within the desktop application, or searching online for the bibliographic data via WorldCat or similar and importing these citations into Zotero via the browser plugin, for the items that had no barcodes or could not otherwise be scanned.

Zotero online group libraries would seem to offer a flexible option for the idea of extending our cataloguing initiative into a collective, inter-organisational library database for some fairly unusual and rare books.

After the heavy lifting of the initial pass, there remained what seemed to be an infinite regress of small items – journals, magazines, random books and journals that slipped through the dragnet, a vast pile of grey literature. And it was all a mess. I ripped everything off the shelves and out of the boxes and dumped the lot on the floor. From there I attempted to reassemble the material into the most basic and easy-to-use categories that were still somehow useable. I don't think this has been quite successful – but I think it's on the way.

In my absence over summer some amazing assistants tackled and substantially resolved the most serious nightmare of this library – the ephemera. Thanks to them, this mass of the greyest of grey literature has now been sifted, sorted, and boxed by year for neat filing away on shelves.

However, we must rally our efforts. The deluge of ephemera is unstoppable and will require ever-renewed vigilance to ensure that the forces of greyness do not completely overwhelm us. But do not despair – together we shall conquer! Per aspera ad astra!

The next step is to attend to the information plumbing.

1. separate the more from the less “substantial” – in practice, books constitute the major substantial category
2. periodicals cover any more-or-less substantial publication issued periodically; but I would avoid mixing these with the ephemera
3. a conference proceedings section that incorporates all types of items such as exhibition openings, reports, yearbooks, etc. that are semiperiodical: I'll probably catalogue these with the canned Zotero item type as “Conference proceedings”
4. an audiovisual section at some point
5. an A–Z fiction section (of mostly trade paperbacks, thanks to the N&M library bequest)
6. an ephemera section, due to the vast quantity of brochures, leaflets, postcards, flyers, etc. that has accumulated; these are more transient and ephemeral than any of the preceding, but may be of value to retain in many cases
7. at any time, the library can expand or contract with temporary autonomous subsections (such as Luea's specialised (and largely German-language) section of all manner of medical, medicinal and metaphysical books)

• need to decide on convention for the “Language” field….
  • either use ISO 639-3 three letter codes. multiple languages separated by commas (e.g nld,fra,eng > ISO 639-3 > http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/codes.asp
  • or use the more expansive/descriptive (but not always consistent) english name for the language as supplied by Open Worldcat (e.g. “The book is primarily in English; prefaces in English, German, French.”)
  • (I've tended to favour the 3-letter codes.)

• in the case of books, I have chosen to file them alphabetically by name of the first author/editor/etc., falling back on title in the absence of an explicit author
• linking to/from the reading_notes and catalogued items may prove interesting and useful, particularly as files can be attached to Zotero items
• often it's unavoidable that you'll have to manually enter and amend data in Zotero where automation fails: this can be time-consuming
• Zotero is more geared to cataloging individual references (e.g. articles in journals) rather than whole issues; one solution is to catalogue them as “books,” with a note indicating what volume/issues are in the library; important individual articles within these periodicals could then be added as separate items
• I'm using the following format to note the individual issues of periodicals: year [volume:issue] additional info (additional info can be season/month(s), thematic name of the issue, etc.); using the notes field like this is a bit kludgy, but at least in this format they will sort by date and issue
• tags might be a good way to physically locate items on the shelf if there is a controlled vocabulary for this purpose, e.g.:

1. fl-books
2. fl-cards-games
3. fl-digital-mixed
4. fl-fiction
5. fl-oversize
6. fl-periodicals
7. fl-periodicals-singleissue
8. fl-tas-luea
9. fl-unperiodicals

(The motivation for the fl- prefix is to ensure a set of keywords unique to this library.)

1. find an interesting book
2. add to the 'book orders' group
3. buy it
4. transfer to libray group once it arrives
5. read (or otherwise absorb)

• distributed collections (c.f. connected libraries)
• ISBN → BibTeX with Ottobib: http://www.ottobib.com/ and http://manas.tungare.name/software/isbn-to-bibtex/
• “The Little Library” project for CC digital collections
  • https://github.com/rwadholm/The-Little-Library
  • http://www.thelittlelibrary.com/

A library – including its physical and digital arrangement and cataloguing system – should aspire to be simple, elegant, and beautiful. Visitors should be able both to browse and search in the greatest ease and comfort. A library thus becomes a pataphor for the art of living itself. I have striven to follow these principles in approaching the sometimes daunting task of coming to terms with, managing and (re)organising the FoAM archive. This particular collection, where each book can in principle lurk at the interstices of the connection of everything to everything else, demonstrates most acutely the issue with filing items according to a single – or even predominant – topic or subject area. At the same time, with items digitally catalogued and instantly searchable by any field (including tags), the physical arrangement becomes less critical for indicating an item's subject, class, or other characteristic. The library is also small and seems unlikely to grow rapidly in the foreseeable future. Therefore, after some (uneven and random) thought, and a close perusal of existing notes on this question, I decided to take the semi-organic organisational approach as indicated below. — Armoracio “Bud” Minuez, Archivist