My Library

A couple of weeks ago Nathalie Paris told me about the My Library app.  She, in turn, had been told about it by Sylvie Doyle.  Now, I have a lot of books that I use both in my teaching and to inform my teaching.  I have blogged about a lot of them on here before, but I've never made an attempt to record anywhere the books that I have.  This app seemed to be a way of doing that, and a way of sharing my library afterwards.

The My Library app enables you to build up a list of your books quickly and easily.  You scan the barcode on the book, which records the ISBN number and locates the book.  Then you can add a Series (I've used this to enter the language the book is in or its theme, e.g. Pedagogy) and any number of categories.  For example, when scanning one of my copies of the Hungry Caterpillar, I entered it into the French series and gave it the categories Numbers, Food, Fruit and Days of the Week:

Now that I have all 422 of my books in my library on the app, I can use the search to find certain themes.  For example, let's say I want to find other books that I can use for Days of the Week, all I need to do is to select it in the search.  I tap on "All categories" first:

And then select the category that I'm looking for:

And here are all my books that have something to do with Days of the Week:

Doing this has highlighted that I have a lot of books about animals, food and colours, but very few or none about other topic areas that I teach.

I scanned all my books in with my phone, and it took several sessions over two weeks.  I've been able to export the library and its pictures so that I now have a copy on my tablet as well.  It's not possible to share the list with someone else without it overwriting all their books.  However, you can export your library as an Excel spreadsheet, which is easy to share and to sort.  The only slight downside of this is that all the categories end up in the same column and you can't use them to sort the books.  You can, though, highlight categories using the "Find" function.

I've uploaded my Excel library to Google Drive, and you can browse it here.

In a geekie way I've enjoyed reacquainting myself with all my books and recording what exactly I have!