Once I began collecting a good number of books for my classroom library, it became important to me that I had some sort of inventory of the books I own. This is helpful when choosing books to read aloud, when suggesting "just right" books for students, and for keeping track of all my books. Since I was using the computer to look up the levels of my books, it made sense to also add the book title, author, level, and library location to an Excel file that I could access when searching for a book.

I chose to print out my Excel library collection file as a sort of "card catalog" for students to use when looking for specific books or books by a specific author.

In the past couple of years, I have been transferring my book collection to Media Collector, a software used with IntelliScanner. An IntelliScanner is a device used to scan the barcodes on your classroom library books. The information is collected and stored on your computer. You can choose to add your own categories to the collected information as well. For example, once a book is added to my collection, I add categories for book level and library location.

Learn more about my classroom library here.