We wrote in a past post about the challenges of alphabetizing our collection of alphabet books, and have since continued to acquire more items. Rather than manually updating the list of books from that post, we decided to experiment with an online cataloguing tool, a project we alluded to in our recent post about The Organization of Information. And how best to start any project? You start with your ABCs…

The Butterflies & Aliens Library is what would be known in the real world as a ‘closed stack’ library – the materials can’t be signed out and must instead be used on site. It is also most definitely a private library. And especially while we continue to struggle under pandemic restrictions, it will continue to be a purely virtual one.

And to the extent that, really, this is more quasi-library than library… one might even be able to call it a library of the mind, or two minds in this case… our goal isn’t to be a traditional library. I mean, sure, we decided to call our search pages “the card catalogue,” but once again, it’s a library of two minds, and two weird ones at that.

So where our “card catalogue” here is really a catalogue of the posts added to “the stacks” of our mythical library, this other cataloguing project – codenamed COBOHOS – is an experiment in doing some actual tracking of our actual closed-stack private library collections.

In other words, it only needs to make sense to us, ultimately, and perhaps be helpful for some possible mythical future in-person patron. But in the meantime, perhaps it can also be a bit of a complement to the discussions and posts we share here, a next-level shelfie, and another bookish place to explore. It will be incomplete and constantly in flux and we’d love to know what you think.

So in that spirit, we invite you to poke around and explore PROJECT COBOHOS.

Happy Exploring!

– Winston

[ update 1: To extend the experiment, we also did a dump of our PROJECT COBOHOS catalogue effective October 31, 2021, and imported it into an earlier cataloguing tool we had been playing with. So take a look at PROJECT INTERLOPER too… ]

[ update 2: We have now set up a dedicated page for The Catalogue Projects. Check there for the latest updates. ]