I'm starting to amass quite a stash of reference materials (books, magazines, etc). My question is as my pile of reference material is getting larger and larger I find I forget I have a book and end up buying something else only to find out later I already had reference material on the subject (I know you can never have too much - still it won't do me any good if I forget I have it). So my question is how do you organize your reference material? Say you are going to build one of the new Staghound kits how would you go about locating your good reference pics out of all those books? Right now I tend to buy books on sale for subjects I'm interested (since good reference books can be so expensive) but as the stacks of material become larger I'm just trying to find a way to better organize it. I work in IT so I guess in theory I could create a simple program allowing me to search my books by subject and content (or buy such a program)?

I'd be interested to hear how others currently keep track?

The only thing I do these days is to keep track of what publications/books I have. If I need pictures of something, I just have to do some poking around to find them. You could spend a long time trying to keep track of what vehicles are pictured in what book. Besides, why deny yourself the fun of browsing through your collection? :-)

I finally started organizing my references on the bookshelf. For example, I now keep all my aircraft references together. They would then be organized by Luftwaffe, Allied etc. And within those groupings BF109 materials together, FW 190 together and so on. I do the same thing with armor references. Panther stuff together, Tiger, Elefant and so on.

The exception would be for my squadron books which I keep in magazine wracks sorted similarly. Then of course all my FSM issues are together, Model Military International together etc.

My wife the one who got all that going for me. She organized my den about a year ago and what a difference that made!

In order for that system to work though I have to put things back when I'm finished with them. Because I'm usually working on or researching several things over a period of time they tend to get scattered around the house depending on where I'm hanging out. I like to build on my "mobile work bench" so I can still hang out with my wife and kids, so I usually have a traveling pile of books that follow me around the house.

I previously had little in the way of a system but after collating my Mil Mods in to folders by Volume them making an Excel spreadsheet index I decided that I will eventually do the same for my Books. it has been a great way to keep track of articles on my favoite subjects. If I add a Genre column Ican search by that or by words using the CTRL F function. By having a remarks column in the spreadsheet I can make notes against books.
My books are in the main part in Archive boxes (about 40 of them!) pending moving but I'll get down to listing them then and start with the ones still out. I used to have most of the books organised in the Bookcases by subject or Puplishers (e.g all the Concord, Osprey etc together)
Cheers
Al