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. 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. — Armoracio “Bud” Minuez

• FoAM Library: http://fo.am/library/
• Zotero online catalogue: http://www.zotero.org/groups/foam_library

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.

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, and Nik and Maja's oscillatory home/FoAM section of mainly fictional items which, one day, they will need to decide whether to amalgamate into the FoAM library proper, or reattach and merge with their own quasi-independent, temporarily autonomous library (hitherto uncatalogued))

• 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., failing that by title
• sifting through the ephemera is going to be long and arduous much easier thanks to some remarkable assistants
• linking to/from the reading notes and catalogued items may prove interesting and useful, particularly as files can be attached to Zotero items: see this example
• manually entering and amending data in Zotero is necessary for a number of items and a good way to ensure accurate and useful information, but it is very time-consuming
• there are so many yearbooks, publications accompanying exhibitions, conference papers, extended brochures, etc. etc. which are not quite periodicals and not quite books: I'm struggling to separate these from the deluge of ephemera and can only conclude that this part of the cycle could do with a substantial bonfire of the vanities selective redistribution
• 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 articles within these periodicals can 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.:
  • fl-books
  • fl-periodicals
  • fl-periodicals-singleissue
  • fl-unperiodicals
  • fl-fiction
  • fl-oversize
  • fl-ephemera
  • fl-ephemera-postcards
  • fl-ephemera-brochures
  • fl-ephemera-menus

what is the motivation for the fl- prefix? “FoAM Library” – a way to uniquely distinguish this set of keywords from any others.

• sort and determine storage for ephemera
• catalogue and shelve readers/yearbooks/conference papers/etc.
• go through remaining files and buckets, sorting into applicable areas
• cleaning up and tagging of the digital catalogue
• add PDFs to the digital catalogue (where available/permissible)
• cataloguing the journals/magazines
• significant pieces of ephemera, articles, etc. could be scanned and added as attachments to the Zotero references

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

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