Manually Adding Books question(s)

1. I have had to add many books manually. The box to the right of the book title is numbered. What goes there? I've found some books with different numbers.
2. If I have a title that has multiple volumes, how do I add them as 1 of 5? I've been simply place Vol. 1, Vol. 2... (Number of Volumes? Is this where I select the Volume number? is there a place to indicate Volume 1 of 5)
3. What is "pagination"?
4. How do you suggest cataloging in my personal library? I have 7 shelves. three on the left, three on the right and one long above.

The box to the right of the title is the sort character. If it is not set, the title sorts on the first character. Sometimes, though, that isn't what you want. 'A Heart of Gold' should sort on H, so the sort character is 3. (A — H) 'The Last Library' should sort on L so you enter 5. (T h e — L).

>1 saved_92: Answers

1. Where to start reading the title for alphabetical ordering. If you have a book called "The book" and you leave that at 0, it will sort with the "t"s. If you want it to sort with the "B"s, you put 5 (aka - skip the first 4 characters "The " )
2. Up to you. As long as it is clear which one it is so it can get properly combined if needed. One thing: If you add that in (), it will be ignored by the auto-combination algorithm so if you do not have ISBN and the titles are Book (Volume 1) and Book (Volume 2), they will get autocombined. You cann always separate but... :) Same applies for any text after ":".
3. Pagination is number of pages. You can also select what kinds of pages they are in the drop down and have more than one entry. So if your book has 8 pages at the start which are I-VIII, followed by 230 pages (1-230), you can add two entries:
8, "i,ii,iii..."
230,"1,2,3"
Or one entry: 238, "total pages"
or whatever else suits your needs :)
4. You can use either tags or collections (or a combination of them) to represent your shelves. As these can be adjusted later easily enough (Well... for some value of easy), start with what makes sense to you now and when you decide to change, use power edit to help you do that.

1. Normally, it auto-adjusts, at least for English. It signifies from where to start when sorting, mainly to avoid sorting by initial articles, so if there's 'The' at the beginning it says 5, meaning it will sort by 5th letter which is the first letter of the next word
2. Assuming you're entering each volume separately, you can put in the title if you really want, or use tags, comments or private comments
3. Number of pages

>4 SandraArdnas: On 1- it auto-adjusts if you add from sources. It does not auto-adjusts for manually added books (which is what the question is about) :)

2) Using just tags and comments when adding the books individually and in the cases when the books share a title outside of the volume number is a recipe for a disaster - it needs to be in the title or combinations become a big problem.

>5 AnnieMod: I assumed the Volume No would be in the title either way, my suggestion was to put Vol 1 of 5 in the other places if one wants to keep titles to 'what's on the cover'

Never realized sorting number doesn't automatically set for manual adds. Perhaps I should double check mine as I don't think I set them myself, at least not for all.

>4 SandraArdnas: *Are you sure about the sort number? If so, It wasn't always that way. When I entered my books years ago all the The and A titles sorted correctly and many of them were manual additions.

>7 jjwilson61: >6 SandraArdnas:

Hm. Maybe? I know that the last few books I added manually in English (which I do not do very often - not for English) did not auto-adjust so I got into the habit of always making sure they are correct. If that works now, then nice. :)

>6 SandraArdnas: :) Clarification is always good - I kinda assumed you were going that way but the wording did not make that clear and a new user may not understand that.

>2 MarthaJeanne: That makes perfect sense! Thank you!

>3 AnnieMod: Perfect! Thank you! on The last question. Again, I have one large shelf with three left shelves and three right then one large that spans both left and right. Could I just number my shelves like (1, 2, 3,...) or would it be best to do (L1, L2...R1, R1, Top)

Thank you all! Very helpful! I have two libraries, One at home, one at my church office. I just finished adding all books to the church office. I appreciate the help. Over time I think I'll go back and adjust/add some of the things I missed.

>10 saved_92: Both the collections and the tags can have whatever names you want them to have - it is YOUR data so you do what is the best for you and noone can change them (tags can get combined into other tags on the site level but that does NOT change your tags in your catalog)

I'd use tags for something like that (because then you don't need to worry creating and ordering and so on) but it's your choice. I'd recommend not to use special characters in the names of the tags (because they tend to break in various places - I like using "type:novel" for example but the iOS app reads that as "type" only which makes it harder to find things. :) Other from that, name them what you want: 1, 1R, Shelf 1, Shelf1, Shelf1R and so on (spaces are allowed, commas are not as they signify different tags). And both collections and tags are very easy to rename if you change your mind.

If you go for collections, all bets on the names are off.

You can also use 'Other Call Number' to indicate where a book is kept.

I add all of my books manually (almost all English) and the sort character field almost always works automatically if I leave it alone. I've only had to adjust it 2 or 3 times ever and I think all of those were times when I accidentally changed the field myself.

>14 norabelle414: Good to know :) I wonder if I forgot to set the language to English in the cases when it misbehaved... or it was just a temporary thing.

Hello. I’m new here. I joined in hopes of finding the name of a book I read several years ago. Can someone offer guidance on how I’d request that information on this site?

>17 RxHdz: Go to the Name That Book group: https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/724/Name-that-Book
Be sure to read the Posting Guidelines.

>18 Taphophile13: thank you