I think the challenges of curating the bookshelves are different for academics, so I'm seeking help from any academics out there on this forum. I'm a grad student and an instructor and I have run out of book space in my little home office. I can't keep books in my campus office, because it's both shared and transient. The piles of books are making me crazy, and I haven't even incorporated this semester's coursebooks (for the course I'm teaching) or the older titles coming in from my parents' place in preparation for their move yet. I am shortly to move myself, and I'm on the fence as to whether that means I should try to be ruthless (fewer boxes of books to move!) or try to be patient (I'll have more book space soon). I've already marked for departure a solid chunk of texts outside my field and easily obtained in the library or on the internet, but I've still got overflow. For me as for many academics, though, my marginalia are part of my work product and process, so that's a concern when it comes to getting rid of things in my own area. Are there other uncluttering academics who have conquered this? Help!
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Posted 3 months ago #
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apart from some few book i scanned all my books, articles and textcopies, even notebooks from former seminars. i spend days and nights in the librabry to scan all those documents but it´s SO worth it. no more shelves blocking my space, no more books at home when i work in the uni and vv. i got rid of about 5 meter of books, 4 meters of textcopies in folders and 2 meters of seminar stuff. i don´t even want to know the weight of this papers :)
now i have access to all of my documents everywhere: i scanned them to PDFs and stored them on my dropbox so i have them on every computer and also on my phone.
sometimes, i print some pages, if i really feel i need PAPER, but i get more and more used to reading/ processing PDFs.Posted 3 months ago # -
I'm doing an MSc and teaching a course. I don't print out any papers, ever. The textbooks for my teaching were sent to me, but when I have a chance I'm transferring them to my Kindle. I have a few hundred papers on my Kindle and also backed up on flash drives. I thought I'd be clever and store them all also in EndNote, but with the new academic year they disappeared somehow, grr! My supervisor has the typical office covered in bits of paper and books, but his colleague next door went from that state to a completely empty office over a summer, he put everything into electronic format like Mimi did. You can annotate PDFs, you know!
Posted 3 months ago # -
I'm with lottielot and mimi - scan scan scan! I use RefWorks to store a lot of papers, and use their additional fields to store additional notes. If I didn't have access to RefWorks, I'd use Dropbox.
I only keep those books I absolutely must have for my work, preferably in Kindle format so I can access them on all my devices (Kindle, laptop, desktop, phone). Everything else I see if the academic library will take and add to the collection. (Not all donations make it into the collection - only ones that are appropriate for the curriculum.) I donate current texts from my classes to the library as well, and then put them on Reserve when I'm teaching the class again. (Good for me and the students!)
The number of books you have may depend on your discipline, though. I'm also tenured, so I suspect I won't be getting a job elsewhere anytime soon. If I were, I'd make an appointment with the appropriate librarian at my new institution to find out how to make sure the library had the books I might need for my research.
Posted 3 months ago # -
Everything that could be put into digital I made into pdfs. Books I do my best to get digital copies of. My colleges like to comment on my "spartan" office. I still have books either given to me or I can't get in digital formats, but they are relegated to one bookshelf.
I agree with awurrlu see if the library will take the books you want to keep but don't need available to you all the time.
Posted 3 months ago # -
Thanks for these responses! I'm reasonably on top of the paper situation—I print as little as possible, and I scan annotated sheaves of papers so as to be able to discard the hardcopies. I'm almost down to no files at all, actually. I do still have a box of notebooks—Mimi, I might try to follow your example about scanning these.
awurrlu, thanks a bunch for the RefWorks recommendation. I use DropBox, but only a free account, so space is limited—I'll check out this new option.
It's mostly just the book inventory that I'm really struggling with: I'm in English, and that means lots and lots of novels. One problem with ebooks is the lack of stable page numbers for citation and in-class reference. And I haven't yet gotten comfortable annotating in non-hardcopy. Do y'all (particularly you, lottielot) find annotating PDFs as effective as marginalia? Did it come with practice?
Posted 3 months ago # -
It's probably quite different working with novels I expect, I mainly work with papers and the odd book, and they go out of date pretty fast, hence you wouldn't have them hanging about! What do your colleagues do? Could you use Kindle versions of some of the novels? Kindle books have bookmarks and note-making facilities, and I believe you can find page numbers on kindle books: see here http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/02/23/how-to-find-real-page-numbers-on-the-kindle/
Posted 3 months ago # -
Although I like the idea of putting everything from texts into digital form, I have to deal with science books. In the past I tried using an online genetics textbook and the format was unuseable due to the illustrations that flowed across pages, the time it took to refer back and forth to appendixes, and the general layout of pages with a lot of margin action anbd fancy graphics. I ended up buying the hard copy of the same book.
My Dh and I are both science teachers and geeks in general, so we have lots of books, including ancillary notebooks and lab manuals. Our closets are full of bookshelves instead of clothes, and we keep adding more shelves. I don't have an answer on the topic since we don't access them much, and keep adding more!
The worst case of shelf hoarding I've seen was a neighbor who collected first editions. He had bookshelves stacked one in front of the other in TWO layers,the books in them were layered two deep on the shelf and every single room had shelves on all the walls. He had over 5000 hardcover books in a 1600 sq ft house. He was divorced, BTW...
Can you create a PDF file to be used on the Kindle or the other new devices? If so, I can see a birthday present in the future for my favorite geek. I already have a Scansnap that is very under-used.
Posted 3 months ago # -
You are all inspirational! So many people could learn from you! Though recycling takes effort/resources, changing your habits to using and refusing paper will slowly shift supply and demand and that's really inspirational.
I've ditched all my engineering text books (even the ones that were out of print, hard to find). I figure if I need them for work, I'll buy what i need - rather than 'justincasing' the ones I have. three years, and I've yet to want to grab a text book I've sold!
Posted 3 months ago # -
nimiety, you could take pictures of the books. it is a very effective way to ,scan' a book, just take a cam. i need about 15 minutes for 300 pages. then i print all those pictures to a pdf, just one more minute. you can use OCD to tranfer the picture to text. that is a very cooooooool way to get the text for citations.
i love the possibility to annotate pdfs. it is so much better than marginalia, you can even print/ export just these notes. or the text plus notes. so it is easy to use the notes in another document that you want to write, no handwriting first (marginalia) and typing it afterwards, if you need it.
my way of dealing with books has changed completely, i dont even take them out of the library any more: i get the book, take pictures or scan and put the book back on the shelf.Posted 3 months ago # -
Lol, Mimi!
Posted 3 months ago # -
hmm? i wasn't joking :/
Posted 3 months ago # -
PS: i dont do that in bookstores :)
Posted 3 months ago # -
I WAS wondering if you were one of those people who read magazines cover to cover in newsagents instead of buying them :)
Posted 3 months ago # -
heehee :) no, i just don´t like to schlepp books anymore!
Posted 3 months ago # -
Late to this party. When I was doing my master's (almost twenty years ago) the scanning and e-book thing wasn't really an option. :-) If I were doing it again I would probably still stockpile hard-copy books since, even now, I work best with multiple pages open before me, scribbling away on a legal pad or stack of cards. But I'd hope I could hold myself down to just the "essential" works!
My thesis was in history but concerned a novelist with four books to her credit. I got the novels all from the same publisher. At the time there wasn't an annotated edition (though there probably is now) and the much bigger trove of material was in her letters & journals - which weren't available at all except through academic publishers. I took them out of the university library, made copious notes, and took them back.
Also at that time there just wasn't a huge amount of scholarship on this author, so managing the pile wasn't too scary. Now there is easily twice as much material.
I don't know how anybody manages academic research now without going the e-route, frankly. If I were embarking on another degree program I suspect I would do the camera and/or pocket scanner thing. I find it much easier to index electronic material than paper.
I think what I would do is extract pages that I wanted to cite and attach them to a page of (electronic) notes.
Posted 3 months ago # -
i have a bunch of textbooks, four medium moving boxes in fact, and they are a base reference material i won't get rid of. some things are quicker to find in compact format in a book (which is why i am keeping dictionaries etc too), but new research articles i only keep as pdf these days.
Posted 3 months ago #
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