Creating a Home Library

This is the first of a series of articles on creating a library in your home. The thrust of this series of articles will be the needs for a Jewish library, however, the basic concepts will be relevant for anybody developing any library in their home.

This set of articles as you might have guessed is not for people who want their house home to be more impressive because of this collection of books. Our goal will not be to explain how to arrange the tomes in an esthetic on a wall in order to capture a certain feeling or mood.

This is a practical series of articles. It will help those who are serious readers or researchers and who are interested in getting the right book for their own real needs and arranging them in an appropriate way in the house or in an apartment.

We will also discuss ways to keep the books in order so that we can find a specific book or books rapidly and conveniently.

Another section will deal with researchers. The typical way to do most research is to write up a document, and often the researcher then searches for materials which match his needs. Especially for the supporting background information. This series of articles will explain how to look find things relevant items in the home library on demand, quickly, and easily so that the background research can actually be done before creating the document itself. This reversal of the natural order the typical order of things or the traditional order of things will make the job far more efficient. Of course, we will also discuss how to place books on the shelf. This too can be turned into a kind of science. There are ways to place it on a shelf not necessarily merely by subject matter but in more efficient ways.

Finally, there will be articles in this series about maintaining the book collection, weeding out unwanted books, dealing with problems as they occur with books such as small bugs which may infest them or damage by water or other problems.

In short, the series is meant to help people through of the issues that arise when creating and maintaining a home library.