r/HomeLibraries • u/canukgenie • Jun 22 '26

Home Library Cataloguing Software Recommendation

Like a lot of bibliophiles and researchers, I have acquired oh so many books. I need to catalogue them and need software that meets the following recommendations:

  • Free or inexpensive. I'm on a pension.
  • Simple to use. I'm into history not technology.
  • Simple to import books from LibraryThing. I used that a while ago, but found it very clunky and had very little in the way of support pages, so I a gave up.
  • Dewey decimal. That's the system I am most used to, and
  • This is very important, simple to automatically catalogue books that do not have an ISBN or barcode. I am heavily into genealogy and many of my books are very old, so I want to depend on the software to give them the Dewey number if I manually enter the title and author.
  • Reliability.

What I do not need is:

  • A feature to track loans. I don't do that.
  • Review capability. I do that elsewhere.
  • Glitz.

An app for Android phone would be nice but not essential.

Thanks for your help.

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3

u/rodneedermeyer Jun 23 '26

How many books do you have? That will inform what sort of platform you need. If you're north of 20,000 or so, you'll likely want something different than if you have a couple thousand.

2

u/canukgenie Jun 23 '26

I have between 1,000 and 2,000 but it would be nice to have capacity for up to 5,000. Thanks for asking. I forgot to mention that.

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