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The vast majority of the books I own have their Dewey number printed on the copyright page right along with date of publication and edition.

Those that don't, I can assign a Dewey number based on the subject matter. Hmm, math...500. Physics, 530. Here's a fairly nice breakdown you can use for just the main numbers.

Now your books are in order. Want to be able to look them up? Someone already suggested the card catalog--a tried and true old system. It works. Or, if you insist on using a computer system, how about one of the available free and/or open source solutions? There are many more available online if you search.

Jim

http://www.tnrdlib.bc.ca/dewey.html

seriously, if you cant keep them in an order, barcoding won't help you find them.

That's not what librarians do - librarians use a couple of different classification systems (Dewey Decinmal, Library of Congress, etc.) that provide rules for generating unique alphnumeric codes for specific holdings... look at the little decal on the spine of a library book. The items are then organized by those codes, which has the effect of sorting by subject. See the LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CLASSIFICATION OUTLINE or the Dewey Decimal Classification System.

http://www.tnrdlib.bc.ca/dewey.html
Should cover every thing you need.
Be sure to print a number under the barcode so you can visually see a book that is out of place. Color coding labels by major subject doesn't hurt either.
-nB

Listen to this speech
Ontology is Overrated by Clay Shirky (from ITConversations creat site!).

Then if you look at the 200 Religion category in the Dewey decimal system you will most likely see a tad bit of unbalancedness. Out of 100 classification slots there are more that are unused than that are allocated to non-Christian religions. A quick overview suggests that a majority of them actually has "Christianity" explicitely in the name or implicitely by being about eg Jesus. Now this may work well in the US, but it sure doesn't work very well in the rest of the world.

Furthermore what Shirky comments on in the speech above is that the entire idea of dividing something into smaller topics is really only needed when you have a physical limitation. (Ie you can't put a physical book in two different bookshelves.) But for all intents and purposes all ontology systems fail in more or less spectacular ways. Furthermore they are always made by someone with (typically) only a vague idea of the topics being ordered.

He also talks about how free form tagging systems like on Flickr and Delicious allow for a more true categorisation to form freely. Similarly to how comments can spread information just the study of how people group items together can give us a lot of knowledge about the items. (This could give the recommendations on Amazon a huge boost in relevance.)

I am writing my own catalog with MySQL/Perl for several reasons.

1) I don't have enough space in my tiny room to fit all my books into bookcases, but with the db I can put some books in boxes in the closet and easily find out in which box a certain book is.
2) I want my books sorted according to a standard classification system but still be able to have them in my own way in the bookcase. Currently I use a heavily outdated (1987) Swedish classification system that the kind folks at my school library lent me. So I'll definitely take look at the Dewey Decimal system mentioned earlier.
3) I have books in several languages and with a db I can have the same kind of information on different books in different languages in the same place. Thus I don't have to look up the romanization for the Kanji (Chinese charachters in Japanese) more than once. But of course it will store the original Kanji-titles as well.
4) I can easily create lists of books that I want to buy and, that friends have borrowed from me or books that I have borrowed.

When it's finished I want it to handle 2-bit languages in a nice way, be compliant with existing standards for book classification, both Swedish and international, allow for easy list creation and have a nice interface.

I put all my books in order on my shelves, and make 3.5" index cards for each, organized by the Dewey Decimal System.

That way, when the power goes out, I can still find the right book by candlelight. ;)

Personally, I think we've evolved beyond it, although it does work well "on paper". :-)