Somebody at your school has been given the library. Possibly you. There are shelves of books, a spreadsheet that stopped being accurate in 2019, and no obvious first move.
Here is the order of work that actually gets it done, learned from watching people do it.
Start with one shelf, not the room
The instinct is to plan the whole thing first: decide on categories, work out a numbering system, maybe read about Dewey. That is how library projects die. You spend three weekends on a system and never catalogue a book.
Do one shelf instead. Pick the shelf nearest the door, catalogue everything on it, and see what you learn. You will discover your real problems immediately, and they are never the ones you planned for. Usually it is that a third of the books have no barcode, or that four copies of the same title came from four different donations.
Scan the barcodes, do not type
Almost every book printed after about 1970 has an ISBN, and most since the 1990s carry it as a barcode on the back cover. That number is the key to a complete catalogue record that already exists somewhere: title, author, publisher, subjects, cover image.
Whatever system you use, find the feature that takes an ISBN and fetches the record. Typing titles by hand is roughly twenty times slower and introduces mistakes you will be correcting for years.
In BeeShelf you point a phone at the barcode and the record appears in about two seconds. Other systems have their own version of this. Use it.
Decide what a “copy” means before you go far
This trips up nearly everyone. There is a difference between a book and a copy of a book, and your catalogue needs both.
The book is Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe: one record, one description, one cover. The copies are the four physical objects on your shelf, each of which can be lent to a different child, and one of which has a missing page 40.
Get this right at the start. If your system makes you create four separate records for four copies, you will end up with four slightly different descriptions and no way to answer “how many do we have”.
Books without barcodes need a different move
Older books, donations, and anything published locally often have no ISBN at all. You have three options, in order of preference.
Search by title and author first, because the record may exist even if the barcode does not. Photograph the cover second, if your system reads covers, which turns the title into a search without typing. Type it by hand last, and only for the books that genuinely have no record anywhere.
For a school library, the number of books that need full manual entry is usually under one in ten. Do not let those ten percent set the pace for the other ninety.
Categories: fewer than you think
You do not need Dewey. You almost certainly do not want Dewey, unless your students will move on to a library that uses it and you want them practised.
What you need is however many categories a ten-year-old can hold in their head while standing in front of the shelves. Eight is plenty. Fiction, picture books, history, science, biography, and whatever your school actually teaches. You can always split a category later. You will rarely merge two.
Do the lending rules once, at the end
Once books are in, decide how long a loan lasts, how many a child can have at once, and whether you charge for late returns. Most school libraries land on two weeks, three books, and no fines.
Fines are worth thinking about honestly. They are meant to get books back and mostly they teach children that libraries are places where you can get in trouble. Plenty of school libraries have dropped them and seen returns stay the same.
What “finished” looks like
You will know the catalogue is working when a child asks whether you have anything about volcanoes and you can answer in five seconds without leaving the desk. That is the whole point of the exercise. Not the spreadsheet, not the numbering system, not the perfect subject headings.
The first shelf is the hard one. After that it is just repetition, and repetition goes faster than you expect.
BeeShelf is a library system for schools, NGOs and small libraries. Start free, or read the other articles.