I recently talked with a potential client about a contract job to arrange part of his private library. He is an avid photographer and has built a significant library of photography-related books and magazines. These range from technical guides on photographic skills to art books, and also such things as travel books for planning photography trips. His interest is in having someone with a professional eye for arrangement organize these books in a way that will make sense to him and improve the usefulness of his library.
My strategy for a project like this is to first build a small but comprehensive controlled vocabulary for his books, according to their use. (As I explained to him, a public library would arrange books by subject because its arrangement is independent of how any one user might use the books, but a private library can afford a more personal arrangement schema.) Then I would inventory the books and assign each the most appropriate term(s) for its use. I could then use this information--and a spreadsheet--to organize the books and develop a sensible shelving arrangement.
This was not really a project I had considered before, but it is actually a great use of LIS skills in the freelance world. Many people have sizable collections of books, movies, CDs, and such, and they feel that their collections are haphazard and possibly that some things are lost. And while the average person probably would not want to pay a professional to organize their home DVD collection, many other enthusiasts, professionals, and perhaps small businesses would be inclined to do a simple arrangement. In fact, an added bonus of this kind of work is that the client not only gets an organized bookshelf, he winds up with an inventory of his materials, indexed by a use schema that he helped design.
Have any of my other LIS colleagues worked on a similar project?
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