How to catalogue a school library in Ireland
Library, reading corner or classroom shelf: scan it and keep a record without typing a title.
Try TitleEntry
Library services to Irish primary schools have been provided by the public library authorities, and the Department of Education stopped its dedicated primary school library grant in 2008. Many schools now keep their own book collections, in a library room, reading corners or classroom shelves, often looked after by a teacher. This page is for them. For the general guide, see school library inventory.
A school book catalogue in four steps
Scan what is on the shelves
Scan barcodes with a phone camera or USB scanner, or photograph a classroom or library shelf and let the AI shelf scanner read the spines. Books with no barcode are read from the spine text, and every book goes into one list.
Tag each book with its shelf
Name each classroom, reading corner or library shelf 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.
Record the language
TitleEntry records the language of each book and lets you filter by it, so English and Irish-language books can be checked separately in one catalogue. A book no source holds can be added by hand with its language set.
Export the record
Export the catalogue to Excel to keep a record of what the school holds. It opens in Excel or Google Sheets.
Guides for other countries: United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. Read more about the AI bookshelf scanner and ISBN scanning.
Irish books scan like any other
The UK ISBN Agency, run by Nielsen, issues ISBNs to publishers in both the UK and Ireland. The barcode on an Irish book is a standard ISBN, so scanning it works as it does anywhere else.
Primary and post-primary
A primary school may keep a few hundred books in classrooms; a post-primary school may have a library room and subject collections. Name each as its own location and the catalogue keeps them apart.
Honest about what TitleEntry is and is not
TitleEntry is a cataloguing and export tool. It is not a library management system: no loans, no pupil 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 to check it against the shelves. If it has none, TitleEntry builds the catalogue from the books themselves. It also gives a school a record of what it holds before it asks the local library service or anyone else for more.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. Nielsen’s UK ISBN Agency issues ISBNs to publishers in the UK and Ireland, and the barcode on an Irish book is a standard ISBN. TitleEntry looks it up and fills in the record.
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 book that no source holds can be added by hand with its language set.
Library services to primary schools have been provided by the public library authorities. The Department of Education supported the service with a per-pupil grant from 1970/71 until 2008, when it ended the scheme.
Name each classroom as its own location and scan one room at a time. The catalogue combines them, and the export shows where every book sits.
No. It catalogues and exports, with no loans, pupil accounts or public catalogue. If your school already has a system, use the export to check it against the shelves. If not, the catalogue can be your record.
Get in touch and we will talk through your collections and set you up.
Last verified 6 October 2026. Sources: NielsenIQ BookData, UK and Ireland ISBN Agency; Ask About Ireland, primary school library services.