Personal Library: How?!

As if there isn’t enough work to do, I decided to organize my personal library. Thanks to my OCD, I have zero tolerance for chaos in this world, and yet my (and my family’s) collection of books has been just that. After some rigorous research¹ on how to organize books—with some of the options being “alphabetically”, “chronologically, “by color” (WHAT??)—I decided to go with Universal Decimal Classification which arranges materials by subject (each of whose contents I would sort alphabetically). However, I realized that if I ever change my mind on the system that should be used, I would have to start over from scratch. This made me focus on a more daunting task first—cataloging!

Before I even try to organize my books, I want to have a good understanding of what is in my possession. Essentially, I want to create a database for my books—each entry would contain the book’s title, author(s), current location (as I move between the UK and Lithuania) and any other useful details. Being the strong independent man that I am, I thought I should build it myself from the ground up. I know some SQL and PHP (both which I had to learn for my startup), so I figured that would be doable. But there came an instant realization that I might not be the only one using the database—my family might too. Given that user interface has never been my strong suit, I decided that this is a silly idea. Besides, I would be wasting a lot of time on this; someone must have figured it out already!

If anyone has had experience with cataloging their books using software and has any suggestions, I would really appreciate it. Here are my preferences:

• Simple (functionality-wise). It’s at most a few hundred books we are talking about, not the Library of Congress.
• Modifiable. I want to be able to add my own fields, etc.
• Easy to use (high-level) interface, as well as a low-level alternative (e.g. a CLI).
• Access by the Internet.
• Privacy/independence. I want to run my personal instance of this database on my server, instead of letting some company handle it. By extension, I would want the solution to be open source.
• Flexibility. The data should be stored in a popular format, so that I could easily convert them, if necessary.

There are solutions like Invenio which seem close to what I have in mind, but they have so many dependencies that I had trouble even trying to install them. Thus, before settling on a solution, I am really hoping to hear from someone who has had to deal with this kind of software before. Thank you.