How do you store and catalog your vinyl?


Just curious how members store, sort and catalog their vinyl collection.
With less than a 1000 I have a hard time remembering just what I already own and have purchased duplicates by mistake whilst at the LRS.

How do you store them?
How do you sort them? Alphabetical or genre or year?
Catalog? In the good old days probably in a note book modern equivalent would be a word document or excel spreadsheet.

Very interested to hear what you do and how you manage that massive collection.
128x128uberwaltz
I have about 3,000 LPs (and around 6,000 CDs). I don't have the LPs cataloged, never felt the need, altho Music Collector or Discogs are both workable, depending. The LPs are stored in modular fashion in U-Haul Small Moving Boxes, which at 12 5/8" x 12 5/8" x 16 3/8" are sized precisely to hold LPs, are inexpensive, and are readily available. These boxes are laid top open on their side with the album jacket's spine exposed on simple plywood and concrete block shelves (in the ground floor storage room, thank you...) which keeps the LPs comfortably accessible yet stored correctly. (Remember that those LPs add up to *a lot* or weight when choosing where to shelve them...) The collection is sorted first by general genre: classical, folk, rock/pop, world, etc. Within a genre, the sorting is more ad hoc based on composer, performer, instrumentation or whatever seems most salient about an LP. If one uses software to catalog one's LP collection, the sensible way to file them would be to match however the software sorts them.

CDs are a different matter...
A few thousand LP's, sorted by speed, then mono, stereo or quadrophonic, then by genre. Sorted within genre chronologically.

Also, a special category for 100 of my favourites. LP's rotate into and out of that category, but it stays around 100.
Discogs to catalog, hands down the best. Plus, when you go to sell one, it’s ready to list! (Sorry Audiogon!)

MoFi inner sleeves are hands down the best.

Man, you guys make it way too complicated! Just kidding, whatever works. I just put my Pop (non-Classical) alphabetical by artist, then chronological. Classical alpha by composer, then alpha by piece title, then alpha by conductor. That's for both LP and CD.

Brooks Berdan had probably 25,000-30,000 LP's when he died. Sheila let him turn their dining room into his LP library. At that time I had about 5,000, and he had 5 or 6 times that. I'll bet Fremer has at least that.

I store my LPs by genre (pop/rock, classical, C/W, jazz, compilations ) and then alphabetically. I also have a category "unclassified", where everything is placed before a listen-through and definitive classification.