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Exterior front of the Balloon Museum with balloons flying over.

Photo by Eva Guerrero

From 629.133 to Infinite Heights: Behind-the Scenes of Organizing the Balloon Museum Library

divider line that is the Balloon Museum's pink color

April 18, 2026

By Rachel Blomquist, museum registrar. 
Written in celebration of National Library Week - Find Your Joy!

Exterior front of the Balloon Museum with balloons flying over.

Photo by Eva Guerrero

What happens when your entire library fits into just one Dewey Decimal number? And you’re a museum?

If you’re the Anderson Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum’s collections team,you quickly realize that 629.133 (Balloons and Airships) is a bit crowded when you have over 2,000 books. In the fall of 2023, we set out to finish our predecessors’ dreams of building a world-class ballooning Special Collections Library—and we learned that organizing books is a high-altitude challenge! Thankfully we had an amazing ground crew with supportive coworkers and our volunteer, Brenda, that spent the last two years skimming books, writing summaries, moving books, and going along with our ever-changing plans.

The Evolution of the Library: From Donations to Databases to Shelves
The journey of our Special Collections Library didn’t start with a trip to a bookstore; it started with the incredible generosity of donors. For over 20 years, ballooning enthusiasts have entrusted the Balloon Museum with their carefully curated personal libraries. Because these are permanent museum collection items, they aren't for "leisure" or circulation—they are to be preserved for future generations of historians, researchers, and other ballooning enthusiasts. So how can we organize the books and let patrons use our Special Collections Library? 

This created our first major hurdle: The Numbering Nightmare

Museums use their own unique identifier systems to track donated items. We had to ask ourselves: Do we triple-number these books? Should they have a Museum ID, a Dewey Decimal number, and a Library of Congress call number? We quickly realized the standard systems didn't quite fly for us for a few reasons: 

  • The Dewey Dead-End: When every book is either about balloons or airships, giving them all the same number doesn't help a researcher find a specific time period or historical moment.
  • The "International" Gap: The Library of Congress’s (LC) Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (CIP Data) on the copyright page is great to use for subject headings, but only 34% of our collection is American (we are the International Balloon Museum!).
  • The Subject Struggle: Even the best LC headings were too broad. "Ballooning—History" covers over 46% of everything we own!

After consulting with some library pros for some help, we realized we had to blaze our own trail just like the various balloonists in our exhibits. We went ROUGUE and created our own custom subject headings to capture the nuances of our collection! But even then, we hit a snag. 

Our second hurdle: The Physical Placement 

Does a book on the Double Eagle II go under the subject heading "Gas Balloons," "World Records," or "Famous Balloonists"? Well, it goes under all three of course! But how does one show that on the physical shelves, besides having multiple copies of the same book placed in each section? Since so many of our books could relate to multiple subject headings, we decided to keep the physical shelves simple.

Our Final Flight Plan:

  1. Organize by Genre: Non-fiction, Fiction, and Juvenile.
  2. Alphabetize by Author: Simple, clean, and easy to find.
  3. Digital Discovery: Researchers can use our custom subject heading tags to find exactly what they need, then pull the physical copy. And someday all books will be notated on our online collections database (next future goal). 

What’s Next?
It has been a long road (or should we say flight?)! By February 2026, we finally finished the massive task of cataloging all of our books and moving them from boxes into their new space. We are still in the process of physically moving the books into their final placement on the shelves, but the dream is finally a reality. Once the dust settles, the Special Collections Library will be open for by-appointment research requests. Be on the lookout in the next coming months on our website for the new collection request form and a few lists of our books by some of our major subject headings. We can’t wait to share this treasure trove of lighter-than-air history with the world! It’ll be such a joy!