Alphabetizing, organizing: some questions

I‘m trying to catalogue my very large library. This requires scanning UPCs of books one shelf at a time and then going in a fixing the data and adding books without UPCs. But because the library is so big, I need to be able to see the gaps easily in My Books. That‘s a problem when I sort alphabetical by author but keep books/secondary literature *about* that author together with the author‘s books. Example: all books by and about Brecht get shelved under BRECHT.

When I‘m going through a shelf to see what still needs to be added I need to have everything in the right place, so I‘ve changed the first AUTHOR field of book about Brecht (to keep going with this example) to Brecht, Bertold (Subject) and added the actual author under Additional authors as „(Author)“.

First question: is there an easier way to do this that also preserves the actual author‘s name as the one shown when I view the list of books.

Second question: what‘s the deal with diacritics and alphabetization? Hölderlin is appearing after HEA in my list. O (or OE) does not come after E….? Is this a bug?

This seems like a good use for the "other call number" field. You could use the author's last name as your call number, or the author's last name and a few characters of the title. It would also allow you to put the books BY an author before the books ABOUT an author, e.g. you could use BRECHT1 for books by Brecht and BRECHT2 for books about Brecht.

Books about Brecht are not necessarily by Brecht. (Sorry, this is a pet peeve of mine). Sure you can shelve them together (but you could use tags to indicate that).

I'm an art historian - I get loads of Rembrandt by Rembrandt &c. He is the SUBJECT, not the author.

>1 Frederick.Family: "Hölderlin is appearing after HEA in my list. O (or OE) does not come after E….? Is this a bug?"

Not really. There are several threads here on LT discussing this. The point is that it is complicated. For instance Danes and Swedes don't agree on where to put ä ë ö and what if you are Danish but have Swedish books. etc. Things are much more complicated than I can convey in a few lines :-)

So roll your own and use "other call number" or similar.

Good grief! Just German uses three various systems for alphabetizing Umlauts. As it is nobody is happy with where these things go, but at least nobody is being given preferential treatment.

>3 Nicole_VanK: Yes, of course, which is why I add the actual author as „author“ under the „additional author“ field, and put Brecht as the „subject.“

But it looks like this will all be unnecessary if I use the „other call numbers“ field. Perfect. I will experiment with that. Thank you all

>6 Frederick.Family: Other call number was created for noting where books are shelved, so it's perfect for that purpose, you just need to come up with the system of notation that works best for your purposes. If you need to note and sort by something that doesn't have a dedicated field, there's always comments and private comments. The vast majority of fields in the catalogue are sortable. Even tags can be used for sorting, provided you put the one to be sorted by first on the list.