“Read any good books this year?”
That’s one of my family’s favorite questions around the holiday table. But if the past is any indication, my answer will be something like: “Yes! … If I could only remember them.”
I have long wanted an easy, reliable method of keeping track of books I’ve read. I’ve tried Good Reads, a bullet journal, a spreadsheet and just keeping a simple list on the fridge. In all cases, after a few entries, my efforts tapered off.
At the end of the day, I’d rather read than keep a log of what I’ve read.
Lucky for me, The Seattle Public Library offers several Library tools that can help, with minimal effort required. I recently experimented with a few, with the goal of making 2022 my Year of Finally Remembering What I’ve Read.
First, an important note about Library confidentiality
The default setting in the Library’s catalog is to not track your checkouts. This is in keeping with our confidentiality policy, which you can review on our website.
Here’s the important sentence: “The Seattle Public Library protects the confidentiality of patron information as part of its commitment to intellectual freedom. Confidentiality and privacy are essential to free speech, free thought and free association.”
In other words, once you return an item, the Library doesn’t keep track of what you’ve borrowed. It also doesn’t track the web pages you navigate to or other Library activity. If you’ve wondered why you never get auto-generated “recommended reads” links while browsing the online catalog, this is why.
How to track checkouts – a simple setting switch
Although the Library doesn’t track your borrowing history, you can opt in to remember it by turning on a simple setting in both the Library’s BiblioCommons catalog and the OverDrive platform for e-books and e-audiobooks. Once you activate them, they will track items you check out from that point forward. It’s easy to set up!
In the BiblioCommons catalog:
- Log into your Library catalog account at https://seattle.bibliocommons.com/user/login.
- Once logged in, click on the tab in the upper-right corner of the screen with
your username, then click on “My Settings” in the drop-down menu. - On the “My Settings” page, click on “Borrowing History” (which is on a menu on the left side of the page). Once you’re on this page, you can toggle your Borrowing History preference to “enabled.”
Note that this feature is just for physical books. And a caveat: Once you’ve activated your borrowing history, it will only track your checkouts for a year.
In OverDrive:
OverDrive allows you to track your borrowing history from the Library’s collection of e-books and e-audiobooks.
- Log in to your OverDrive account at https://spl.overdrive.com.
- Click on “My account” on the tab in the upper-right corner of the screen and then “Settings.”
- In the center of the page, look for the checkbox under “History,” in the “General” settings section, and check it.
- You can also add books to your OverDrive history that you didn’t read through OverDrive (or delete books that you have read), and even create wish lists.
A more flexible system: Shelves
In the Library’s catalog, BiblioCommons’ “Shelves” feature is a more flexible and long-term system. You can track books you’ve read, books you want to read and books you’re currently reading. You can also track movies, music and anything else in the Library catalog.
Using Shelves does require a bit more effort. But if you’re already spending time on the Library catalog, it’s easy to build it into your browsing. Any time you’re viewing an item in the catalog, you can tag a book as “Completed,” “In Progress,” or “For Later.” You can also click to the Shelves section of “My Account” (under “My Collections”) and add titles to these categories.
Since my Library checkouts often do not reflect the books I’ve actually read, for me, Shelves is a more honest system. I recently spent a happy 20 minutes creating a list of books I’ve read in 2021 in Shelves, with the help of my summer 2021 Book Bingo card (another useful tracking device).
For Libby lovers: Tags
If you’re an e-book reader who mostly accesses the Library through the Libby app, this might be the tool for you: Libby’s Tags feature. (For the uninitiated, Libby is OverDrive’s wildly popular mobile app that lets you check out e-books and e-audiobooks instantly, as well as place and manage holds.)
As described in this article, you can use Libby’s Tags feature to track your e-checkouts, e-books you’ve sampled, or to manually build lists around parameters you set. You can even synch it with your OverDrive wish list.
Where did I end up? Much as I love Libby, because I want a system that also tracks physical books, I’m going to give Shelves a whirl in 2022 as my main mode of book-remembering. The borrowing history tool will help too – in some cases, as a reminder of books unfinished.
For me, remembering what I’ve read is a way of remembering life: I might have a terrible memory for titles, but once I see the name, author and cover image, it all comes flooding back: Not just the plot and characters, but how I felt while reading (or listening!), and what was going on in my life. It’s like having a journal that someone else wrote for me.
Happy remembering.
Resources:
- Read more about the Library’s commitment to privacy and what you can do to protect yourself in this excellent Shelf Talk post from 2017.
- Read more about BiblioCommons’ Shelves feature. One note: Your Shelves – unlike checkouts – are public unless you’ve marked them as private. Every time you add an item to your Shelves, you can mark it as private. You can also change your privacy settings for all Shelves item by going to “My Settings” (under the “My Account section”) and scrolling down to “Privacy / My Shelves” and changing the setting.
- Read more about the history feature of your OverDrive account.
– Elisa M., Communications
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