Have you ever gone to the Amazon website to search for a book you want to purchase, only to find a message that says something like this? “You purchased this item on May 2, 2008.”

I have a love/hate relationship with that feature. On one hand, I’m grateful that the system reminds me that I already purchased the book from them. But on the other hand I feel like the message is screaming directly at me “You already have this book! Go check your bookshelves and work on your household organization skills!”

We have TONS of books - on shelves, in bins, under beds, even in boxes that were never unpacked! I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve seen that Amazon message too many times…

I recently walked into my youngest son’s bedroom and found him quite distressed. He was looking for his current favorite book –Shiloh– and it wasn’t where he had left it. I knew that this was the beginning of a major meltdown, so we quickly went to work searching for it. When we finally found the book in a bin of his brother’s toys, the paperback cover was creased and torn. The meltdown ensued….

My youngest son has been diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder. It is very difficult for him to function in a disorderly atmosphere. He spends a lot of time putting his toys and books in a particular order. And he checks them regularly. He sat there holding his book with tears running down his cheeks and said to me, “Mommy we have so many books I want to read, but none of them are in the right order!”

At that point I realized that my book organization (or lack thereof) was negatively affecting my special guy’s willingness to read new books. Over the past few weeks I had noticed that he always chose one of the 10 or so books on his shelf to read during our free reading time. It turns out he was limiting his selection to only these books because they were the only ones in order!

I’ve been meaning to organize our books - *someday*. When I realized the effect our book disarray was having on my youngest son (and possibly my older two as well), I decided it was time to act. Books are their tools for learning. How can I expect them to *use* their tools if they can’t *find* them?

After doing a google search on the Dewey Decimal system (and deciding it was too great an effort), I found a great free online tool called GuruLib.  “GuruLib’s mission is to help catalog, connect and share books, movies, music and games between home libraries.” That’s it. You go to the site and register for a free account and then you begin entering the books that you own. You can enter books by title, author, or ISBN. Once you find the book you have, you simply click on the ADD button and a photo of the book cover is added to your virtual library (photos are not available for all books). The coolest part is that you can create virtual shelves that correspond to your real shelves. If I own a cherry wood bookshelf with three shelves, I can organize my virtual library as “Cherry top shelf”, “Cherry middle shelf”, and “Cherry bottom shelf”. I can then move the virtual books around and place them on the same shelves as my real books.

It only took us about 10 minutes to register for a GuruLib account and enter all of my son’s favorite books. He thoroughly enjoyed re-ordering the virtual books and then running over to his shelf to re-order his real books in the same way. After a while my older sons joined in the fun and before we knew it we had organized four large shelves of books! My children chose to group them by subject - some subjects made sense only to them - but now they can easily look at their shelf on the GuruLib website and find the book they want. We also printed out some of our GuruLib pages so they know where the books should be returned. And of course we’re planning to label the shelves too.

No, we’re not even close to being finished. The four shelves occupied only one room of our house. But we made a good start. And we have realized that in order to organize the books that are hiding in many other locations, we need more shelves. So I ordered more shelves and our Labor Day weekend plans are to organize ALL of the books in our whole house! It’s a big goal and I’m sure the kids will tire out after awhile, but I won’t stop until finished. If organizing all of our books encourages my children to read, then it’s worth it!

And if I ever see that Amazon message again, all I have to do is go to my GuruLib account to find the book on my own shelf!

So I challenge you to do the same. We’re homeschoolers. We have a lot of books. Are yours in order? Sign up for a GuruLib account and get organized. Let me know how you’re doing!

This article was featured in this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling, Labor Day: Labors We Perform as Homeschoolers, hosted by HomeschoolCPA.  Check out the other great articles available at the Carnival each week!