cataloguing antiquarian books and manuscripts

Is there a good way to use LibraryThing for manuscripts and antiquarian books? I have a personal collection of about 300 to 400 items from the 19th and 20th century (depending on how you count), a lot of which has only fragmentary identification (maybe more if I spend time on palaeography). Some of it is hybrid publication+manuscript. I've been looking for a while for a system that'd do a good job of it.

So far I've done a hundred or so items in Zotero but it's not working so well. The fields are flexible enough but it's not really made for searching and sorting and structuring.

The bottom line on this is using the manual process at the bottom of the "add book" page. The second thing to do is to review the fields and decide how you are going to use them. Most are rather easy. Some you need to develop what you want to put in the field. If you want to know how I do it, please send me a note.

Limitations on my part. I'm very basic about what I catalog. I don't use the group function. I don't use common knowledge. I'm into using tags. It goes without saying you must be consistent about how you enter tag information, etc. Caps do count in tags. "purple" is different from "Purple."

Finally, pick a group of 10 or 15 books in 2 or 3 subject areas, load them and then do some searching.

You might also want to see how Worldcat indexes items. Once cannot copy data from there directly into your entry by some type of automatic method BUT if you at least make your data look a bit like the way they do it, searching for works in Worldcat works a bit better. Now that is rather confusing. Hopefully you do wander through Worldcat every so often.

I'm not sure what country you are in but if US, I'm continually surprised by the amount of 19th century material that pops up in LofC. Can't speak to 18th century stuff and most of that is out of my price range!! I am interested in Railroads and Industrial History in the UK and the same thing goes for the British Museum.

Thanks. I do find a lot in Worldcat and LC (I'm not in the US but I studied there). What I'm hoping for is ways to distinguish the multiple contributors of a work: as well as authors and illustrators, there are sometimes annotators who can be named (e.g. because they signed the book and the hand matches throughout), the lecturer whose classes the notes were taken in, and so on.

Medium and format can be tricky to fit into standard fields, too. I have hybrids of print, manuscripts, typescripts, spirit duplications, blueprints, carbon copies, pasted-in photographs, ...

It's a history of education collection focussed on the practices of teaching and learning rather than the so-called "great minds".

'Other Authors' can take designations outside the standard list.

I have a lot of older books in my library (some it appears I am the only owner of?). I just did the manual entry with as much information as I could provide and in the private comments section I added other information that I thought might be helpful.

I often had similar books that I could use to fudge a call number.

As said above, you can add in illustrator, etc and you can add as many new fields as you like.

I sometimes have multiple editions or print & ebook. So I sort by publication date or I added the tag of ebook, first edition, paperdoll, gift, signed, illustrated, etc.

I've kind of just been making it up as I go along. But I just do what works best for how I use the items. Maybe you can work out your own system and then use add manually to input it?

We have some manuscripts for books which were ultimately published. However, I have not separately cataloged them in LT. Perhaps I should.

I wonder if the fragments you mention have titles. I know you said that the authorship was unknown on some. These are two basic fields for an LT entry. I don't know that they are required fields but when it comes to sorting a collection, it could get confusing to have these float to the top or the bottom of an alphabetic list.

We also have illustration artwork and I wonder whether it is a good idea to catalog them. I recall the early debates about cataloging perfume and taxidermy with LT. I also have not cataloged any of our music or video holdings even though sometimes it would be interesting to know what we have or do not.

James