How to catalogue a school library in Canada
English and French books, one catalogue. Scan the shelves and keep a record without typing a title.
Try TitleEntry
In Canada, education is run by each province and territory, and school libraries are staffed and funded very differently from one school board to the next. Reports on Canadian school libraries describe shrinking staff and budgets, which leaves a part-time teacher-librarian or a volunteer to keep the collection in order. This page is for them. For the general guide, see school library inventory.
A school library catalogue in four steps
Scan what is on the shelves
Scan barcodes with a phone or USB scanner, or photograph a shelf and let the AI shelf scanner read the spines, whichever language they are in. Each book is added to one list with its cover and details, and its language recorded.
Tag each book with its shelf
Name each shelf or collection before you scan it, so every book is recorded against where it sits. Moving a book to another shelf later is one edit, not a re-scan.
Keep English and French apart
TitleEntry records the language of each book and lets you filter the catalogue by language, so English and French collections can be checked separately. For a French immersion or bilingual school, that means one catalogue with two languages in it, not two spreadsheets.
Export the record
Export to Excel when you are done. Each school or board can keep its own file, or you can combine catalogues into one spreadsheet.
Guides for other countries: United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Ireland. Read more about the AI bookshelf scanner and ISBN scanning.
Canadian books scan like any other
Canadian publishers can get free ISBNs from ISBN Canada, run by Library and Archives Canada. The barcode on a Canadian book is a standard ISBN, so scanning it works as it does anywhere else. Where a title is in no database, add it by hand.
One school or a whole board
Name each school, library or classroom collection as its own location. A board that wants a record of what its libraries hold can export each catalogue to Excel and combine them.
Honest about what TitleEntry is and is not
TitleEntry is a cataloguing and export tool. It is not a library management system: no circulation, no student accounts, no overdue tracking and no public catalogue. See our guide to book cataloguing software for how the options compare.
If your school already has a system, use the export as the basis for a stock check against it. If it has none, TitleEntry builds the catalogue from the shelves, one location at a time.
Frequently asked questions
TitleEntry records the language of every book and lets you filter by it. Books are looked up by ISBN in the same sources as any other title. A French book that no source holds can be added by hand with its language set.
ISBN Canada, a service of Library and Archives Canada, provides free ISBNs to eligible Canadian publishers. The barcode on a Canadian book is read like any other ISBN.
Scan in short sessions and name the shelf before each one. Every book is saved to the same catalogue, so you can do a shelf at a time over several weeks and still end up with one complete list.
No. It catalogues and exports, with no loans, student accounts or public catalogue. If your board already has a system, use the export to check it against the shelves. If not, the catalogue can be your school's record.
Get in touch and we will talk through your collections and set you up.
Last verified 6 October 2026. Sources: Library and Archives Canada, ISBN Canada; Library Journal, Canada’s School Libraries in Crisis.