AllMyBooks for church libraries

A parish or congregational library is usually a few shelves in a hall, a room off the narthex, or a cupboard in the Sunday-school wing — kept by volunteers, in whatever time they have, often after someone else kept it for twenty years. It needs a catalogue people can search, numbers on the spines so books go back where they belong, and a way to know who has what out. It does not need an integrated library system, and nobody has the budget or the evenings to run one.

AllMyBooks is a cataloguing app for people who keep a collection: households, and small institutional libraries like yours. The list below is what it does today — not a roadmap.

Point your phone at the barcode on the back of a book and the title, authors, publisher, year and cover come back from the book data sources; confirm and it is in the catalogue. A volunteer with a phone can work through a shelf at a steady pace without typing anything.

• Scan the ISBN barcode with the phone app or in the browser on a laptop.
• Older donations with no barcode: type the title or author and pick the edition, or enter it by hand — pre-ISBN books catalogue perfectly well.
• On the phone you can also photograph a whole shelf and have the spines read, then confirm each match before anything is saved.
• Every physical copy is tracked separately, so three copies of the same devotional are three copies, not one row with a number beside it.

Church libraries shelve by Dewey far more often than the software written for home collections expects. Each book record carries a Dewey Decimal number and a Library of Congress classification where the sources have them, and each copy carries the shelving call number you actually use — so a reference copy can be “REF 248.4 LEW” while the circulating one is “248.4 LEW”.

• Dewey and LC numbers arrive with the book where the catalogue sources have them, and you can set or correct either by hand.
• The library list sorts in shelf order — Dewey or Library of Congress — so the screen reads in the same order as the shelf when you are hunting for a misfiled book.
• Call numbers are per copy, so donated duplicates that live in different rooms keep their own numbers.

Labels print from the browser — choose a shelf or a set of copies, pick the layout, and use your browser’s Print or “Save as PDF” onto ordinary label sheets. There is no separate label program to buy.

• Spine and pocket labels in either a title-and-author or a call-number layout, each with a QR code that opens that exact copy.
• Shelf and location labels, so the bay itself is labelled and not just the books.
• Printable borrower cards with a scannable code — part of tiny-library mode, which an admin turns on per library and which is off by default.

Patron checkout is part of tiny-library mode, which an admin turns on for one Library at a time. It is off by default: a new account gets a catalogue, not a circulation desk, until someone deliberately enables it.

With the mode on, the people who borrow from you are patron records in your Library — a name, an optional email or phone, an optional roster number, and a borrower code the site mints. They are not accounts: a patron never signs in and never sees your catalogue from the inside.

• A circulation desk page takes a borrower, then the books, and commits the whole stack in one action — typed in, or scanned with a keyboard-wedge scanner.
• Set a default loan period in days and each checkout is dated from it; anyone at the desk can still change a due date.
• An out-on-loan and overdue report you can print or download as CSV — the list you carry to the shelf on a Sunday morning.
• For a patron whose email you hold, a best-effort emailed nudge when a book is late.
• Every checkout is an ordinary loan on that copy, so it shows up beside everything else on the Loans page and is returned the same way.

• What tiny-library mode costs a parish →

The public catalogue is also part of tiny-library mode and is off by default. An admin enables the mode, then publishes the catalogue at an address of their choosing; turning either off takes the public page down immediately.

Published, it is a read-only catalogue anyone can browse and search from a phone in the church hall, with no account and no sign-in — titles, authors, covers, the call number they are walking towards, and whether a copy is in. Prices, private notes, private locations, who has a book out, and your members’ names are never part of it.

A Library is co-owned. Invite the volunteers who keep it and everyone works on the same catalogue, with a role each: Admin, Member, or Guest. A Member can catalogue and lend; only an Admin changes Library settings, manages members, or turns tiny-library mode on. There is no cap on members and no cap on books.

• Who pays, when a whole parish uses it →

A card file or a spreadsheet someone has maintained for years imports directly: upload a CSV or tab-separated file, map the columns — including Dewey, LC classification and call number — and see what will happen before anything is written. A UTF-8 MARC 21 file from another catalogue imports the same way, classes included. Re-importing the same file adds nothing twice.

Readerware exports are recognised from their header line and mapped for you, which matters to the church libraries that bought it: the program can no longer be bought or supported, and an installed copy is the only copy left.

• Moving a Readerware catalogue across, step by step →
• Comparing AllMyBooks with the alternatives →

Export the whole catalogue as CSV or JSON whenever you like, free, with no item caps and no collection-size tiers. A church library outlives the people who keep it and the software they chose; the point of an export is that the next volunteer is never locked out.