Shelving Location Field

It would be great to have a field added that can be used to track our own individual shelving location. For example, I have several rooms of shelving, with multiple bookcases with multiple shelves. I also have boxes of books in the basement that have yet to be unpacked, but I have a spreadsheet of the titles and what box number they're in. I'm already using the private comments box to record things such as "signed by author - "To xxx, Enjoy my book, xxx date" and other pieces of information. It would be terrific to have another blank field that could be used for location codes and used for a "shelf list" as such. I do use Dewey, but what room/bookcase/shelf or box that book is actually in would be a great help!!!

Many people use tags for this, and it seems to work fairly well. With one click on a tag you can see which shelf/box/etc your book is in. .... I have more then a few location-tags.

However, for precise locations, like "bookcase A shelf 1 3rd book", "bookcase A shelf 1 4th book" or whatever, an actual field might be nice.

Actually we have been promised a field for 'other classification' which I would consider this to be, but is seems to be another '2 weeks' job.

I prefer to keep my tags to be subject and physical or classification characteristic (HB, PB, ARC, signed, limited, 1st). I badly need a location field (called "shelfmark" in some feature threads) since I have 7,100 books in 1,100 sq ft and some of the items are boxed or backshelved. This field must be accessible in the power edit mode so I can select a bunch of books and set them to a single value.

Adding the values would take a good deal of work for us but I think it would be important for us. Also, for the people I want to encourage to use LT it would be important (along with some ways to store values).

James

I've used tags pretty successfully, as in @box32, etc. You can do it in power edit.

So I'm re-visiting this thread 10 years later...

The reason I have resisted using tags is... as of today, I have 9,739 books in my collection and have 9,069 distinct tags. I mainly use them for subject classifications, awards, physical characteristics, etc. - very similar to James. I did not want to add shelving locations into tags also.

Now that we have moved into a house that we have purchased and will be here for awhile (hopefully), I plan on using the "Other call number" field. I have devised a "call number" classification system that works something like this:

1st number: room
2nd number: area of room
3rd number: bookshelf range
4th number - bay
5th number - shelf in that bay

So a book with the "Other call number" of A31.23 would be located in the downstairs family room (A), in the area on the long wall under the east window(3), on the bookshelf range in the left corner as you face the window (1), in second bay of shelves (2), on the 3rd shelf from the top (3). I went with letters for the room designation to help distinguish the Other call numbers from the Dewey numbers.

Problem solved, for me at least.

I ran into this question myself and reached the same conclusion: "Other call number" works great for this. (Personally I use it to encode the work's place in my personal "taxonomy" of subjects, which then maps to shelf position.)

I think this is a better fit than tags which are more suited to grouping books by multiple "facets" rather than describing a one-dimensional ordering.

This is an old topic. We didn't have that field in 2011.

>8 MarthaJeanne: Just commenting in hopes it will be helpful for people like me looking for a solution to this question in 2021. :)

I'm new to using LT but am bugged by "OtherCallNumber" and "Copies" fields not being included in "Add books" and "Quick edit". If these were included, all the information I currently need could be quickly and easily be entered to my library.

I've been using "Tags" for shelf/location because there it is on the "Add books" form and in "Quick edit". But this is a disaster. "Tags" is the field that enables myself and anyone else to search my library by topic. All that anyone finds under "Tags" is meaningless shelving data. There is no easy way in LT to fix this.

OK. So I export my library to .csv where I can easily move "Tags" to "OtherCallNumber" and fill "Tags" with appropriate search items.
But this does fixes nothing. There is no way for me to restore my library from the updated .csv file!

Why on earth is there no Restore function? I started a topic about this a month ago only to irritate people who have been asking for such a function since 2016!

How do we get Tim and his team to listen to us?

So two things please Tim

1 Please enhance "Add books" form and "Quick edit" by including "OtherCallNumber" and "Copies"; and

2 Please provide a "Restore" facility from the .csv (better .tsv) export.

tiggermark

The form for manually adding books does include Other call number.

Quick edit has only a few fields, and there would be a lot of argument about which fields to add if it were to be enlarged. Other call number would probably not be a favourite. (Reading dates!)

The 'Copies' field is rather useless, as it doesn't allow the copies to be borrowed separately.

In Add Books, instead of Clicking on Quick Edit (one click), just click on the editing "pencil" (one click) and you'll see all the edit fields you want...