This is pretty interesting. We've also been looking for a cataloging solution using similar criteria. For us the biggest issue is that what we want to catalog (zines and DIY comix) don't usually have a bar code at all, so we also needed a system that could generate that for us. We're in the process of getting a system up and running based on Koha, which is "real" ILS software. You may be able to use it for the non-English titles. It is FOSS, and runs on Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and probably anything that can handle Perl.
Craig
· 2 years ago
Sounds like an interesting project. I will have to pass it on to my brothers librarian girlfriend.
Did you consider librarything.com, I have been using it for a few years now, and it seems to fit the bill for me.
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
Can we see some photos?
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
Cool article and solution. Did you do anything to tag books with their LCC numbers once you found those numbers?
Ryan
· 2 years ago
Do you have any links to the bookcases you got? I can't see anything on the home-despot site...
aceinthehole
· 2 years ago
Good read. I'd like to see a picture of what 3,500 books in a home looks like! :)
Rick Cook
· 2 years ago
Well, for a small library of mostly newer books, I suppose...
Seriously, thank you for sharing your experiences in so much detail.
We've looked at this. (Like you I have one of those 'wife' things. And she brought nearly as many books into the marriage as I did.) The problems we ran into are:
A) We currently have about 20,000 books.
B) A great many of our books predate 1975 and perhaps most of them are earlier than 1985.
C) A lot of them are popular fiction, which is not the LCC's strong point.
D) And this was the killer -- the system assumes you can replace everything on the appropriate shelf in a timely fashion. Lazy slobs that we are, that's a major problem.
Still, you've given everyone a good overview of setting up a catalog system and that's much to be appreciated.
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
Post pictures of your library...
Fred
· 2 years ago
If you can handle a router and a table saw (no, the other kind of router!), you can build a functional bookcase out of (yes) 2x4's and 1x10's. Costs less than the bookcases and can be customized to fit your space. I have 60 ft of 8-ft tall book cases, about 540 ft in all. This holds roughly 9000 books.
Since I only have about 8000 books, there's plenty of space for organizing subjects into a scheme that fits the way I think.
But you've got to plan for expansion!
Greg Noe
· 2 years ago
Great read, glad to see you had the perseverance to go through with it! Pictures would be great too!
Jay Maynard
· 2 years ago
I'd like to know how you decided which shelf to put a book on, and if you attempted to do the cataloging in any kind of order...or if you just worked through things as they existed and depend on Readerware to tell you where the book is.
slambo
· 2 years ago
We also have a large stack of books, but we've got a much larger stack of magazines (a very large number of them have to do with rail transport history [e.g. Trains, Railroad History, Passenger Train Journal] and model railroading [e.g. Model Railroader, Railroad Model Craftsman, Mainline Modeler]) that would need to be cataloged and shelved. How well would the software you identified work with periodicals?
edward aka heyduard
· 2 years ago
particle board will do in a pinch, but will sag over time on long spans (except for furniture grade which is very thick!). Plus outgassing from the glue used to make particle board might not be good for collector items. Just some things to consider.
libri_amor
· 2 years ago
Zack; My wife and I share your problem with 1500 books throughout our house. Now that you have an ISBN list please checkout Library Thing. A great catalog site for sharing etc. I am a big fan of "tagging" books. On Library Thing I am libri_amor.
Brian
· 2 years ago
@Fred - Any pictures or drawings available online?
"epaper" book readers like Amazon's Kindle or Sony's PRS-505 are improving. you can store hundreds, even thousands, of books on one of these devices at a time. the main problem is that documents formatted for 8.5"x11" paper do not look very good on these readers. I would expect this to change in future models.
consider buying ebooks instead of hard copies, whenever possible, for future purchases. save trees, save lots and lots of space, and you can search for any text online.
in your copious spare time, consider scanning books that are all text (no pictures, diagrams, math, or code). the free ocr software tesseract has worked nicely for me.
dlwa
· 2 years ago
This is so Odd. I have been usein Koha and lc classification for more than a year. I even use the same bar code reader you have
http://library.dlwa.com
Sean
· 2 years ago
You didn't mention anything about the labelling of the books themselves... I assume when you want to shelve or re-shelve a book, you scan it and then look up the appropriate location (LCC) in ReaderWare? As you expand your collection are you finding you need to physically move shelves of books around or does it adapt pretty well?
Maggie J
· 2 years ago
This was very informative, but you did not address my most serious problem. I am constantly buying new books. I sort alphabetically within category. This is particularly important for my mystery collection, where I want to have everything by a given author in one place. But, I am constantly running out of room on the shelf to which the book needs to be added. So I end up with new books scattered all around the house, wherever I can find shelf space. How do you deal with this problem?
Larry W. Virden
· 2 years ago
It sounds like you are in the midst of a project I yearn to begin. All of your tips seem useful.
I have a shelving question. Are you just shelving things "randomly" as you go, and using some sort of notation to indicate the room and bookshelf that holds particular books? Or did you two decide some sort of room designation "the master bedroom will hold books on relationships, the kitchen will hold books on food, the media room will hold books on computers and the various medium, the baby's room will hold parenting books, the bathroom shelves will hold humor, etc." or what?
Just curious...
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
Great you have the books organized now how about the info in each book. I know I saw an article on some topic but i can't remember which book it was in.
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
Did you consider Evergreen ILS?
http://open-ils.org/
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
Particle board might not be able to support a shelf stuffed with books, especially if you're tempted to stack them two-deep (when your collection outstrips the wall space).
Likewise, use care not to overstress the contruction materials of your home (especially in an area prone to earthquakes) by arranging your shelving as stacks in one room (especially upstairs). (Yes, I've seen this turn up as a problem.)
Hmmmmm, I have one of those husband things, but have never been tempted to merge collections (except cookbooks, travel, and general reference). Congratulations on taking that on.
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
Went the readerware system as well, but instead of Cue cats (I even had some laying around) I went to e-bay and got the barcode reader for my Handspring (cost 20$). I had to also pick up Handybase software ($29.99 but had to go to older version 2.75 DDH software was very cooperative about this).
We are not trying to sort the books, but I have 2,842 books cataloged at this moment. And about 50-75 books were weeded out as duplicates. 7 or 8 shelves left to go, I'm closing in on the end of it.
Gabriel Hurley
· 2 years ago
The last time I used Collectorz.com, it supported Library of Congress classification...
Gabriel Hurley
· 2 years ago
...I just installed the newest version of Collectorz.com and it does suppport automatic Library of Congress and Dewey Classification.
efc
· 2 years ago
Wow, a lot of effort. You should at least look at LibraryThing.com which rewards you with a rich community of co-conspirators for your home-cataloging project. They even sell scanners for about $15 (remember those old cuecats!).
Happy Lemming
· 2 years ago
Another way to sort is:
1) books we will read many times 2) books we will read again, once 3) books we will never read again 4) books we will never read, ever.
Anything classified 3 or 4 goes to the used bookstore, ideally to be replaced with category 1 books.
This keeps our library a bit smaller, but it's still overflowing, much to my wife's annoyance.
Michael Bourgon
· 2 years ago
Interesting. Our library is much smaller (probably ~1000), but visually quite impressive - we used Elfa hardware, and put on stained/sealed 1x6s. Screw into the headers (although theoretically the Elfa will be able to hold just using regular sheetrock). Our wall has 8 shelves (with room for another 2-3 at the bottom), and the hardware was only 100 or so. Plus it's nice (and impressive to the neighbors) to see an entire wall of books.
Kevin
· 2 years ago
Well done. Does your system enable you to record information about the physical volume, such as condition? How does your system distinguish multiple copies of the same book?
Zack Grossbart
· 2 years ago
Thank you to everyone for your comments. There are a number of cataloging applications I hadn't found and I am excited about looking into them. There have been a lot of questions on the shelving system that we use.
We have all books on shelves organized by LCC number. This gives the books a good order for browsing and makes it easy to find individual books. We didn't tag or mark the books in any way. It is pretty easy to find books on the shelves, but we still occasionally look them up in Readerware.
When we add new books to the system we shelve them in LCC order. We keep a certain amount of space on our shelves to make it easier to add new books. It is important to have a good feeling for the types of books you tend to add so you know where to leave some slack. New book cases are added to the end of the system over time and the system will expand into those cases as we add more books.
-Zack
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
- Thank you for taking time to fully outline your solution, it's great. As for the foreign languages, some real library system like Aleph used in university libraries, supports them, but this would probably be an overkill for a home library, even an extensive one:)
lambj
· 2 years ago
I foresee another potential problem those on slashdot may not understand... you have a baby, who will grow into a toddler, who will grow into a child. It can wreck havoc on anything within reach in a remarkably short time.
Mine reorganized my books for me... by cover color. Chaos!
You may want to add child-proof to your system specs.
Uncle Dave
· 2 years ago
I have just a few categories for my 2,000 books, each alphabetical by author:
Greek, Latin, Russian, German, Science, History, Political Economy, Jefferson, Other
Cheap and easy. I can quickly turn to any category and be amazed at what I used to know.
The hard part is inserting new books onto the shelves -- that is, making the horizontal additions vertical.
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
You seem to be missing about a thousand books.
Kelly
· 2 years ago
You are all closet Librarians! But thank you it was entertaining, and I guess we've (meaning us librarians who moved away from that old card catalog a long time ago) got it right after all.
Kelly
Ben Bederson
· 2 years ago
Well, this isn't going to be easy to fit your problem, but it is an innovative interface for searching for books and reading online. Check out the International Children's Digital Library - www.childrenslibrary.org. It has very nice visual tags for searching - even on things like the color of the book cover, and it supports books and metadata in many different langauges. And best, it is all completely free, and with no ads.
rAy
· 2 years ago
I would second Heather's comment about WorldCat.org. This service connects the world's libraries and often will bring about possible LC numbers for books to those who prod it. Even with LC classification you have problems in that different libraries choose to use different cutter tables or use different parts of a cover's details even if they are using the same cutter table. Thru WorldCat you can search by ISBN, see the libraries with the item you are holding onto and pick an LC # from one of the holding libraries who use it over their own classification or Dewey. Warning tho, some library websites link better than others to the OCLC number that ties them to that record.
Before learning about Marc21 records, cataloging software, and other such things my wife and I labored on our own database using a customized Access file exported to HTML every few months. Talk about a PAIN. Mad props on the entry.
Ruth
· 2 years ago
If Fred is who I think he is, the wall mounted system he described works very well and actually looks quite nice. It takes up one whole wall in a room, though those of us who are shorter occasionally find it difficult to reach the top shelves. A litte more work with wood stain and the like and it could potentially look quite nice.
Personally I gave up a few months back and got the most recent version of Collectorz.com software, which in its newest version not only supports LC numbers but also has support for the Flic scanner (which you can buy from them for a price about what you paid). I've been slowly working through my books in the form of a couple shelves every month or so. My biggest problem has simply been that many of my older books don't have a barcode for the ISBN, so a large number have to be entered manually.
rbarr
· 2 years ago
I really think that you should check into librarything.com, as it stores just about everything about a book and all you do is enter the ISBN or scan the barcode. The site retrieves the cover art and book details (see below) from amazon.com, the Library of Congress, or any of 136 sites around the world. May import book info from your current software. You can share your library's info with others or keep everything private.
Try it for free; lifetime membership: $25. Obviously run by a booklover that is doing this for pleasure. (I am not involved in this site, other than a happy user. I even set up a separate account for books loaned out to friends.)
You can organize and display your collection many different ways. The cover art feature is especially cool. I hope you give it a try. --------- Details: by inputting one ISBN, librarything.com will collect the following for me (except my tags and personal ratings):
Title Author Rating Tags Your review Other authors* Publication Publication date ISBN-10 and -13 (including multiples) LC classification Dewey Subjects Primary language Secondary language Original language Date acquired Date started Date finished Summary Comments Private comments BCID Number of copies Citation sources Entry date Data source Other members with book (count, ids) Number of reviews Popularity ranking Average rating
NSK
· 2 years ago
I organise my books as follows: Every book is described by some tags (words or short phrases). Books with the same tags are put near each other, and books with dissimilar tagd end up away from one another. To find a specific book, one has only to find a similar one and look nearby. That's all. Had I a robotic arm in my library, it would be completely self-organising.
david
· 2 years ago
I second the LibraryThing.com recommendations as a happy user. It stuns me it wasn't one of the ones you tried.
Jason
· 2 years ago
I spent my money having a carpenter hand-craft custom book shelves in the walls of my own home library, but no time at all in organizing it like this. Of course, our own collection of books is dramatically smaller. That said, I would be very interested in seeing some photos of your bookshelves in use. How you have laid out your physical environment is at least as interesting as how you cataloged your content.
Jacob
· 2 years ago
We have about the same number of books you do. My wife (go team!) eventually settled on BookCat for our software. It's windows only, but it handles thousands of books pretty well, knows about barcode scanners, and can query both the LoC and Amazon (among many others). Her favorite part, though, is all the extra user-defined fields she has set up to reflect all the information she likes to track (like individual family-member ratings and who has read which books).
dan
· 2 years ago
How do you relate db info to the physical location of the book?
For books without bar codes, did you print & affix them to the cover? (if so how/what did you use to affix them?)
For books without LOC numbers, did you 'invent' numbers or index on some other field?
Brad
· 2 years ago
A far, far easier system is possible, though it doesn't exist yet. However, the tools are around us.
1) Shelve books wherever you feel like at the time. Reshelve later in different places. This is the only system that actually works for most people.
2) With nice light, every so often quickly photograph the shelves with a nice digital camera.
3) This is the hard part. You need a "book spine aware" OCR/recognition program. First, it would be a program that attacks the specific problem of book spines. Spotting the border between spines. Converting the random sets of background and foreground colours to simple contrast for the OCR algorithms. Isolating and identifying the varying type sizes and orientations of spines. Knowing it only has to search in a limited database of known book titles and known authors and known publishers. Publisher Imprint logo recognition helping it a great deal.
However, it can also just recognize the spine by creating a fingerprint of the image, and comparing it to a public database of other people who have photographed the same book. (For libraries you would have to know to remove library catalog tags or just OCR them.) Like cddb, for books.
4) Now you can create "virtual bookshelves" on the computer, with real images of the real book spines, for browsing. You can browse by author, by LoC, by DDC, whatever you like. Then it tells you "That book is #20 on shelf #15"
This is what I really want, it's what we all really want, I think. The OCR system is hard, but all the basic tools already exist, little new research here, just software eng. I think libraries and used bookstores would pay well for it too, so go write it!
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
Would you consider donating the books to a local Public Library (or High School College/University Library) as a private collection? What money you would have spent on software/time/bookshelves could be donated to the Library to setup the private collection. You could ask them to make the Catalog entries so you can search to see what you had donated.
Not only would you be able to check out the books you wished to read, others could benefit from your generosity.
Jen
· 2 years ago
I love your enthusiasm for categorizing your books. My husband and I also have a large library, including my own collection of mysteries. Just organizing my small (100+) agatha christie collection has been a struggle. I kept buying titles and covers I already had.
Solution: Delicious Library + iPod. I scanned the covers of my books into DL, along with all the edition info and loaded it onto my iPod, which I take with me to the bookstores. When I find a book I like, I scroll through the pictures and titles and I know whether I want that particular cover or not.
However, DL is pretty limited when it comes to older books - took a long time to set it up.
Eric
· 2 years ago
I had the (dubious) honor to establish our corporate library (after impressing the boss with my home library and its catalog). The largest departure between your research and mine was in the selection of a primary indexing string and the range of materials to be indexed. I also had to index and track magazines, catalogs, technical data sheets, corporate publications, CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, software (no physical media), and the papers of ex-employees.
You mention the difficulty in assigning one multiply categorizable book using a category system as a negative for DDS. Then you picked the LoC's category system as your winner. In my research, this came out as a wash because
* both DDS and LoC are subject categorizations * both DDS and LoC can have multiple assignments for a given volume
However, your desire to classify foreign books more or less immediately disqualifies LCC for you -- the LoC is only expected to catalog books published in the US. Other books are cataloged, but there is no duty to do so. This is one of the reasons I went with DDS for the library at work -- there are DDS assignments for foreign works.
You mention that DDNs can be library specific. My research did not support this conclusion -- I found that there were published databases of DDNs, but these were priced out of my budget. Then I found that (1) the LoC assigns the vast majority of DDNs for US books (DC21, and similarly numbered authorities). I also found that your example interpretation of the DDS is not entirely correct. Given "641.3/003 21" in the LoC, "641" is the section, and an index of sections can be had with some Googling, ".3" is the rest of the assigned stem, and "003" is the optional continuation. "21", meaning "DC21" is the assigning authority (LoC, in this example). Thus, the book has any of these DDNs: "641.3", "641.30", "641.300", or "641.3003". The idea is that a library may choose to include or omit optional digits, depending on how many are needed to reduce collisions in the local library. Being a geek, I decided that we always include all optional digits in our DDNs.
I suppose the part that amused me in your article was your observation that LCC data was available, but DDN data was not. The LoC entries for their books almost always contain DDNs. I wrote the script that looked up DDNs in the LoC data from scanned ISBNs. So when you say you went to the LoC because you couldn't get DDNs ("but that system [for DDNs] does not provide programmatic access to their database and does not assign numbers to many of the books we own"), I completely fail to see the distinction you're trying to draw. DDNs are field "082", part "$a" in the LoC MARC (Z39.50) records. Fixed and optional digits are separated by a slash. The assigning authority is in part "$2". E.g. "082 00$a515.7/246$219" from "QA329.2.C665 1986", is 515.7 to 515.7246, assigned by dc19 (also a LoC desk).
However, there *are* DDNs for foreign books, so we got further in our cataloging than we could with LCCNs alone.
Beware ISBNs. There are known collisions and there is a propensity for number re-use for children's books. We found several "9876543210"s in our collection.
In my research I also discovered that Cutter codes are not part of assigned DDNs. (Probably doesn't surprise most of you, but it did me.) Cutter codes are published and can be had for a fee, but only serve the purpose of providing a short string for (roughly) alphabetizing by author's name. So we didn't bother.
We ultimately ended up with what we found in several public libraries: distinct collections for distinctly indexable materials: the magazines are separate (sorted by title, then date, labelled with an expiration -- add-ins are included with the issue with which they shipped and are labelled with the shelving and expiration information for that issue), the technical books are separate (DDNs and then by author), fiction books are separate (we didn't distinguish scifi vs. western vs. mystery because we didn't have enough to justify the trouble), catalogs and data sheets and corporate publications are together (sorted by the name of the issuing company (at the time of issue) with cross referencing inserts/dividers for companies whose names have changed, mutated, e.g. Aldrich vs. Sigma-Aldrich), ...
If only there were a coherent indexing scheme for all this stuff...
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
The real (i.e. REALLY FAST AND EFFICIENT) solution would be different.
1. Get a cheap digital camera (you probably already have)
2. Print 3500 labels, each with a single bold large either consequtive or random number on it, on sticky labels using a regular printer.
3. Stick the number - photograph the book spine. Much faster than 100 per hour, I'd guess 10 seconds per book or less.
4. Dump one memory-card-full of lowest resolution photos to your computer.
5. Crop them automatically from a free photo/graphics program
6. Make a descriptions file to your numbered pictures of book spines (or first pages, for that matter). Because you stuck and photographed the labels in order, numbered jpeg filenames will match those on the book spines.
7. Over time as you have your spare half-hours or free weekends, enter whateer info you'd like to make searches for into the one simple text descriptions file (e.g. topics/tags, author, title, ...)
3500 is so small a number, that this project will not burden you at all. 3500 is so negligible, you can avoid using any databases, and keep one file which is a numbered line with description per book, and simply grep in it for info.
You'll get the answer in hundredth's of a second.
No scanner, no work, just go buy a pack of labels for your printer.
Demosthenes
· 2 years ago
Yet another happy LibraryThing.com user. They support barcode scanners (including a special CueCat mode), and have tons and tons of features you get when you have multiple users combining their data. Would you like book suggestion from local library, based on books you own? If it's a member of LibraryThing for Libraries, then you can do that.
KentSin
· 2 years ago
I am a librarian, and I wonder this things a lot.
Now, do yourself a small exercise : to locate a book about "red color", yes!
No classification is perfect! No one can make a perfect catalog. But a useful one that do 80% of the job possibly cost you 20% of effort.
Organize your book by chronolical order, after you read it, put it to the back of the stack.
Place all oversize book in one place.
If you are not satisfy : check out librarything.com
melvil dewey's ghost
· 2 years ago
You say: “The assigned numbers are not fixed. There is no central authority assigning DDC numbers to books.” Both these statements are totally untrue, and I’m puzzled as to how you’ve come to believe them. A DDC number is assigned to each newly published book by a division of (ironically enough) the Library of Congress, while the system as a whole is maintained through the regularly revised DDC catalogues. If you have indeed found two libraries assigning different numbers to the same book, it’s almost certainly because one of those libraries is using an older edition of the catalogue and/or disregarding the DDC number printed inside the book. It’s a pity that you have convinced yourselves against DDC, which is far more rationally organised than LoC and covers every possible topic, but there’s no accounting for taste.
Jacob's Wife
· 2 years ago
Jacob isn't aware that BookCAT, created by a European, lets you scan all sorts of foreign databases--including most of the Amazon sites, which are increasingly complete thanks to users selling out of print books of all kinds. The program's other major advantage is that it is constantly being updated, with minor upgrades being free and major ones costing about $18.
I catalog the same way a typical public library does: fiction by category and alphabetical within the category, non-fiction by Dewey number. I also second Eric's comments about DDS numbers; while it's true that the system allows libraries to have variations in a catalog number, this usually applies only to the highly refined subcategories (numbers after the decimal point). In general, a book will have the same number no matter what library it's in. Not that this means you shouldn't use LoC over DDS, but the objection you raise doesn't really apply. The Library of Congress site points out that the real difference between the systems is the underlying logic they use for categorizing.
Bruce Anderson
· 2 years ago
AP suggested that the future library will be digital, and to avoid buying paper whenever possible. Without wishing to seem rude, but knowing it's inevitable, I've got to laugh in his/her face. eBooks are evil. Even assuming you're not locked into a DRM-laden proprietary format like the Kindle's, you're still reliant on technology. What happens when your Kindle's batteries die? What happens if you want to return a book? Or what happens when you want to sell a book you've purchased but no longer need? If you're locked into a DRM-encumbered system like the Kindle, you lose the right to sell the item you purchased. Worse still, you don't actually OWN the item you purchased! You own the permission to access a file, that's IT.
My wife and I have several hundred books on our shelves, and I'm preparing to fully integrate them (heck, we've been married ten years...I think it's safe to say if she hasn't gotten sick of me yet she's not likely to!) this month. I'm not sure I need to invest in a major cataloguing system, but it'd be nice to be able to keep things organised. I found this article to be very interesting and it's given me some ideas. I'll need to get my wife to read it some time and see what she thinks.
Chris @ http://www.historicus.
· 2 years ago
Granted, we are only at 1,500 books, but librarything and a CueCat barcode reader did the trick in terms of cataloging. I still need to invest in additional shelving, though. Librarything does allow you to import/export your catalog as well.
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
Seems as if you put a lot of time, effort, and pocket change into reinventing a wheel that already rolls perfectly well (at $25/lifetime plus $15 for a hackable cuecat) over at LibraryThing.com.
Even with your sunk costs, you should check 'em out. They meet all your criteria, including #3.
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
My book collection is small even by these standards. I've used Alexandria to catalogue them, but they aren't really indexed, or organised. I might have to look into something like this.
jamminjj
· 2 years ago
When the author says "It needs to be easy to find a book." I think he means to find it physically on a shelf. Or at least that's my concern. And librarything doesn't seem to help with that at all, as far as I've been able to tell.
William
· 2 years ago
I use Readerware. I'm a Mac guy. I now have nearly 2000 books, which I have been collecting since the early 1980s, so over 90% of them have ISBNs. I first built a database in MS Access 97, back when I had only hundreds of books. Then, the primary intention was to prevent duplicate purchases, and my Access database was sufficient. However, adding books was time consuming, since I had over a dozen fields as well as scans of the covers. So, after a few years, I started looking around for a better solution, and found Readerware.
I think Readerware is one of the best apps for personal libraries, and would recommend it to anyone. It's shareware, with a free 30-day trial, so give it a test drive. You can export it to a PDA, so I bought one--a Palm, which I take to the bookstores to prevent duplicates.
One downside is making a "to buy" list, for when you browse used bookstores--I haven't figured out how to store more than one Readerware database on a Palm.
Overall, Readerware is not perfect, but it's darn close.
Barry
· 2 years ago
Readerware works pretty good for our library as well. I hacked the cuecat to not do the encrypting thing, then it works like a champ! Here's what about 4000 books looks like in our library.
http://web.mac.com/barrywoods/Site/Library.html
Wesley Parish
· 2 years ago
Well, FWLIW, I tried to make my own library automation software, back in the nineties. I eventually gave up after realizing my experience was too limited to be able to sell it to any sizeable library.
I'm currently considering Evergreen and Koha.
Ah, yes, 4-by-2s and 10-by-1s! That would probably be the only way I could get my collection out and available to me. And no, I have not counted them. But I don't have near enough, and there are very many authors I have yet to read, names such as Kalidasa, Li Po, Herodotus, etc, that should be in the list of any self-respecting well-read person! ;)
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
I *like* real books -- but my wife and I are making plans to move our family onto a sailboat within a year or so -- which means the books can't come with us.
So I'm trying to come up with a workable digital solution. My plan is to get as many DRM-free books on a hard drive as possible (finding digital books we want to read that are DRM-free will be the stumbling block, not HD space) and they can be read using laptop, PDA, etc.
But I'm trying to figure out what kind of "database" I should use, or should I just do a search on the drive when I want to find something about woodworking, or Heinlein or whatever?
Any ideas on that as well as a source of digital books that are DRM-free (not just public domain books, but fiction and stuff that' current) would be appreciated.
Ian
· 2 years ago
You *can* get scanners that will scan using a camera, rather than using a custom scanner. This is much nicer - you simply use a $10 webcam to do the job.
Unfortunately, I tried a couple of library programs and got nowhere with this approach - one (possibly Libra, but don't hold me to that) scanned the barcodes and added the book 50 times, and I think I tried Libra only to discover that my camera is far too cheap to be acceptable to Macs.
Anyone else had more joy with this?
Jac
· 2 years ago
LibraryThing can help you find books on a physical shelf too - tagging. Tag books with the room they're in, the shelf number if applicable, or your own strange code if that's what appeals, and hey presto, you can look up the record and know instantly where it is in your house. Or out of your house if you've lent it to someone...
Multics
· 2 years ago
A friend gave me readerware and the dvd and cd versions. I've got 1566 books cataloged (most imported from a palm database I started a few years ago). The palm export lacks a scroll bar to make it easy to scroll through large lists of books and only has a small subset of the data. I've got about twice the books you do. I've had very little problem with the cuecat (came free with readerware a the time). I've read all the books on my shelf. Many of my books are pre-isbn so finding isbn's for them and/or LCC has been somewhat of a problem. My shelving is by category and then alphabetical by author. F&SF; (paperback/hard cover separated), computers, odd sized, everything else.
Cujo
· 2 years ago
This is cool, but I solve this problem by letting my local library keep the books and keep them organized.
Les the librarian
· 2 years ago
The best way to organize your books is to hack into a large library's catalog. Catalog your books into their system using a unique prefix for each title.
The second best way is to hire a retired or unemployed librarian with experience in a cataloging dept.
Morbo
· 2 years ago
What makes you think ISBN numbers are unique?
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
Very interesting. My mother cataloged her (4000+) books using a database program (Microsoft Works 4.5... for Win 98... so you can tell how long ago THAT was...) She uses Dewey Decimal and tagged each book with a printed label with the DD# and another label inside with the number and her address so if they were lent out, you could find them. The regular old database allows searching by keyword in any category as well as sorting on any field, so it works well enough for her. Unfortunately, it does take a lot longer to enter things, but since at the time she started, bar code scanners were not really available for home use, I think she did a pretty good job.
Myself, I used a similar system for my 3,500 books, but lost the catalog through a hard drive crash (and the backup CDs had failed, too... aaaarrrrghhh!). And now that I have Husband 1.0, the difficulty is merging the two collections together, as well as recataloging everything and deciding whose copy of "Digital Logic Design" we should keep (or both?) and other such things. :)
I hadn't really thought of a bar code scanner... I might want to look into that... though a LOT of my collection is pre-barcode, so it would only help on a small percentage.
Anyway... excellent article! Neat to hear that I'm not the only one with books. ;)
MugsyNoir
· 2 years ago
I also use Readerware. In fact I bought the entire suite, which has separate databases for Books, DVD's and CD's.
With that package I received the CueCat Scanner free and I used it to enter all of my books that had bar codes with no problems. I currently have over 2300 books and audiobooks in the database. If an older book has neither an ISBN nor LCC, you can always go to Alibris and find a book listed that makes it easy to do the grab and drop of the information from the website right into the RW DB.
I order quite a bit from Amazon and it was a nice option to be able to download my order history right into the database, then just eliminate those books I gave away as gifts.
Other features: I have used both the Palm port and the Ipod port and found the Palm easier to view.
I very rarely loan books, and then only to those I trust as highly reliable to return them, but I like the Loan Tracking feature, to track where they went and when.
If the cover art isn't available with your autoload, you can scan in the jpeg and add it to a record.
I use the same bookshelves you found at Home Depot. If you scan the sale ads for Target , KMart, Wal-Mart, and others, you can find them on sale every couple weeks some where.
Good article of your process.
Kristen
· 2 years ago
Very neat!
I'll add one comment about LibraryThing.
If you belong to an extended family of serious readers, having everyone's collections online and thus available to everyone else is extraordinarily handy for birthdays, etc.
It does have importing options, although I haven't looked into them.
Jay Queue
· 2 years ago
Thanks a lot for posting this. It was a very good read!
I was part of the team that set up the UNLV Law Library in 1998. When we opened the doors for the inaugural law school class, we had statutes of 37 of the 50 states, with plans to acquire the remaining states' codes over the following two years.
Once in a while people would call and get angry about the fact that we didn't have a particular state's code, and they always seemed to think it was out of laziness. I call it the "Bridge Building Fallacy." It goes, "Hey, you wanna build a bridge? What's so hard about that? Just get some bridge stuff and put it up!" We are all prone to it when thinking about issues involved in disciplines the details of which we are not personally familiar with. Your post illustrates the problem from the point of view of a library very nicely. So far you've worked your way through about a third of your 3500 book collection, but picture doing 400,000! Not to mention that the requirements for a professional library catalog are much more complex than what you're dealing with. Hopefully people reading this will gain a little more insight into what it takes to establish and operate a library.
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
I just used readerware to catalog about 1000 books donated to my daughter's impoverished school by her old elementary school community (she is a Teach for America volunteer). The CueCat worked in part but I ended up typing in the isbn as it was about as fast and more reliable. Then I let readerware fetch the cataloging and cover images in batches. These were all children's books and I had trouble finding about 5 % of them, either because of bogus/missing isbn or because the book was too old for an isbn.
Readerware supports modifying its screen scraping of cataloging mechanisms for new/alternative catalog info sites, and also comes with numerous European information sites. I didn't have books in other languages than English, so I don't know how well these would work. (Readerware did retrieve some of my cataloging from the British Library.)
The backup format of the Readerware catalog is actually a zip file of sql and ddl for the java imbedded database it uses, and I easily modified this to restore the data to a different database of choice for a separate project.
Support is excellent from Readerware.
Jay Levitt
· 2 years ago
@jamminjj: Wait, you can read them, too?
@Zack: Interesting that you chose the LCC solution. I thought about this when I was organizing my home library too, although I have no foreign books and probably about 25% of the number of books.
I looked into the LCC, and the Dewey decimal system, and how they were organized, and I realized that neither was really suited to the way I "felt" about the books.
Then I realized that there's a third system: Bookstore (i.e. category). And you know what? I spent a lot more time in bookstores these days than I do in libraries - which is why I have a lot of books. And I can usually find things in a bookstore pretty easily without looking them up first.
Now, at my level - say 700 books, I don't know the count - there are obviously a lot of subject-matter gaps. But that's actually an opportunity. I created an area for biographies; later, when that got too big to manage, I split it into personal biographies and "business biographies". That flowed into the business section, which is next to management, which goes above software management, which is right next to software, then math. Math is one bookcase over from language, but also one bookcase from physics.
Neurology and psychology eventually got split in two, with neuropsych taking up the middle, and Stephen Pinker sitting between neurology and language. And so forth.
In short, I created a spatial organizing system that fit the books to the space in a way that flows. I too bought the Flic scanner, and it's very cool - mine's got Bluetooth, so I can scan a bunch and then go to the computer later - but I never got around to the scanning, because I can instinctively know where a given book is.
Within each category, I usually organize alphabetically by author. I played a few games where it made sense - for instance, "How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found" simply had to go next to "How to Find Almost Anyone, Anywhere" (in fact, that's how they were shelved at the bookstore when I bought them).
Woeful
· 2 years ago
As a librarian I commend your ingenuity. However, using LC for such a small library is overkill. There is a "fixed" system for Dewey Decimal classification, it's called the Dewey Decimal Classification revision number 22 (DDC 22) and it's published by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). The beauty of Dewey is that it can be customized for a particular library and its users. The real drawback to using Dewey is that in large libraries (over 500k items) accurate cataloging can mean a number that wraps around the book!
You could have probably got the old version DDC 21 from a public library and for you purposes it would have been more than adequate to meet your needs. That said, LC is a fine system, and since you already went through all the trouble it should serve you well. Best wishes!
Richard Maine
· 2 years ago
I'm in the middle of redoing my library database for a few thousand books with Collectorz.com. I used to have my own home-brew program, but it was sorely lacking in many ways and I needed to move to something better. Almost every commercial option I looked at was missing one thing absolutely crucial to me; without it I'd have felt like I was moving down instead of up from my old home-brew program.
Contents of anthologies. I want to be able to search on an individual story and find where I have that story.
Collectorz.com was the only thing I could find at that has anything at all for contents. I won't say it is perfect, but it seems ok. My only alternative was looking like another home-brew effort, possibly using something like FileMaker, but that would have been a lot of work.
Yes, I have to manually enter all the contents, but at least it has somewhere for me to put them.
Brad Knowles
· 2 years ago
I worked in the main library (shelving books) at the University of Oklahoma for 4.5 years, as I was working on getting my BSCS degree. I helped excute the move of one of our branch libraries during this time, and I helped plan and execute the move of another branch library. I am intimately familiar with shelving books in both the LoC and DD systems. My wife and I have well over a dozen Ikea bookshelves, more books than we have bookshelves for, and currently have much less space for bookshelves than the number of units we have (the rest of the bookshelves are currently in storage). I have a few comments based on my experience which I would like to share with you folks.
First, one of the biggest pains we ever had at the library was when one shelf overflowed with books and we had to move the books around to re-balance the shelves. When a whole section in the library had this same problem, it became a nightmare. Part of the solution is to make sure that you keep ample growth room empty at the end of each shelf, so that you don't have to re-balance, at least not very often. You also keep empty space for shelves at the top and bottom of each shelving unit, in case you need to add more shelves. And you leave space to add more shelving units at the end of each row in case the growth is really explosive. You can put oversize items on a shelf by themselves, or you can reserve the bottom shelf of each unit for oversize books.
Second, the LoC system does accomodate magazines and other periodicals. Each title should have an LoC number, and then each specific magazine should have a volume and issue number. Just put the LoC number on the box(es) in which the magazines are located, and then sort the boxes by year/volume, and then sort each box by issue number. Simple. The LoC system also accomodates other types of items, too -- including DVDs, videotapes, etc....
Third, you have to keep in mind that things are going to get messed up. People (including you) are guaranteed to put things back in the wrong place sooner or later, and you're not going to be able to easily tell it's in the wrong place unless you label each and every thing in your library. Library management software should be able to use a standard label printer (or sheets of labels in a desktop printer) and you can then affix the labels to the books, magazines, etc.... I would caution you to stay away from inkjet printers for this function, because they produce output that is water-soluable, and even a single drop of water on your label can make it unreadable. Of course, you could put tape over the label and partially address that problem -- unless the cover itself gets wet and the water comes in through the cover and behind the tape. I suggest laser printed labels and tape as the most secure solution. Note that the labels don't have to be big, just readable.
Fourth, when looking at building or buying shelves, keep in mind that books are extraordinarily heavy in large amounts. Keep your bookshelves on the ground floor or basement only, unless you have a certified engineer come in to check your house to make sure that you can safely store large amounts of weight in small concentrated spaces upstairs -- more than a few houses have collapsed ceilings because the pool table/work out equipment/bookshelves upstairs are just too heavy and concentrate too much weight into a space that is too small, and the construction is so shoddy that the building just can't take it. Don't ignore the cost savings of buying lots of commercial-grade storage, if that keeps you from having to buy and install replacement cheap-ass particle board bookcases every year or so. Also consider proper built-ins, if that's an option. Make sure all bookshelves are properly affixed to the walls for safety (trust me, you REALLY don't want a shelving unit to fall on you), and make sure that all freestanding bookcases are properly affixed with rods, bars, or some other sort of method to the units that are affixed to the walls, or are otherwise kept secure from any likelihood of falling over, even in a moderate earthquake.
Fifth, any decent library management system should also be able to use USB or FireWire webcams as bar code input devices, so that part should basically amount to briefly holding the item in front of the camera for a few moments while the software does the scan, then going onto the next item. Once you get a little practice, you should be able to do this part of the process very rapidly.
Sixth, you do want to keep a "new books" section, where you keep items that have not yet been entered into the system. You also want to keep a "Returns" section, so that you have just one place to go when you're done with a book. You can then go back every so often and pick up all the "returned" books and put them back on the shelves where they belong.
I'll check out LibraryThing, but I'm much more likely to use software like Delicious Library (despite the horrible name). Note that they support pulling information from six different international sources around the web, and the program is fully translated into multiple different languages. I might also take a close look at Koha.
My point here is that ease of use is key, otherwise you simply won't ever use the system. At least, you might use it once, when you're doing the initial setup, but probably not after then. You have to design this system for ongoing maintenance & operations, not necessarily for what's cheapest or what looks pretty. IMO, DL has all the hallmarks of a program that is both very pretty and also very functional. But we'll see.
Brad Knowles
· 2 years ago
BTW, when I say that you should leave space at the end of each shelf for growth, I'm talking like a LOT of available space.
At the library where I worked, we had a 50/25 rule. Each shelf should have at least 50% space available for growth, and if any shelf got below 25% available then it should be re-distributed or re-balanced. If any shelving unit had an average available space less than 25%, then we'd add more shelves at the top and/or bottom, potentially including completely unloading the unit so that we could squeeze the shelves closer together in order to add even more shelves.
When the average space available in a section got below 25% available, we would re-distribute and re-balance the whole section, including entire new shelving units at the end of each row, entire new rows of shelving units, or whatever else was necssary.
You may decide you don't need to use the 50/25 rule, but this concept is a good one to keep in mind.
But you should know your library best, and you should know which sections are likely to grow faster than others, and you should be able to plan accordingly.
je
· 2 years ago
I've cataloged about 3,500 books so far with LibraryThing see profile). My goal was exactly the same as yours - to map out the whereabouts of books scattered around the house and in storage. The LT tags provide an easy means to pinpoint location, as well as allowing me to give each book a meaningful ID. With the CueCat scanner, I can input about five books a minute. For unusual material - and I've got lots of oddities - all but about two dozen books were easily located in other world libraries linked to LT. It's a remarkable tool.
Nann
· 2 years ago
Re: shelving. At home we use Ikea units. Very sturdy and relatively inexpensive. If you are REALLY serious about shelving LARGE quantities of books, why not buy genuine library shelving? New stuff (e.g. www.highsmith.com;www.demco.com;www.gaylord.com) is expensive but if you go to a library that's moving/remodeling you can get a good bargain.
You state that your local library system won't let you see the intricacies of the cataloging. The major library catalogs have a "see full catalog record" feature that will display the MARC format. You can also see the full catalog record on FirstSearch, the OCLC catalog. Since OCLC is the cataloging utility used by libraries worldwide (non-English and non-Roman alphabets, too), you ought to find all of your personal books there.
Personally, I'd rather spend my time reading (or quilting) than organizing our home libraries. Rough count for DH and me is 5000 volumes. We know what we own and we can find what we need. (Of course, DH is a former librarian and I am still a librarian.)
BRO
· 2 years ago
Why don't you use librarything.com?
James
· 2 years ago
I would say one of the best reasons to do this is for insurance reason. If something terrible like a fire or flood happened in your house, you would be set for getting all 2,500 of your books replaced by your insurance company.
Let's just assume the books were $6 each (pretty cheap estimate), with a full inventory you'd get your $15,000 back to buy the same books or different again. And with a detailed list like yours you could actually price the books and find out the real replacement value which is probably higher than $15k.
Well worth the $500 to organize and catalog them. Great effort. And I can totally relate to the urge to build your own software. Heck I would have wanted to build my own shelves too. Way to restrain yourself to the project at hand.
Talking Books Librarian
· 2 years ago
I also wanted to second Library Thing, as at least one other reader mentioned! And while you're at it, check out my blog on Talking Books at http://talkingbookslibrarian.blogspot.com/
:)
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
LibraryThing here! Yes, I work for them. Just to get out of the way.
But: we do handle multiple languages, since we pull our bib' data from over 80 institutions from around the world, including the Library of Congress. (and Amazon, lest we forget!) Our site has been tweaked to understand Cuecat scanners' barcode gibberish; in other words, book ISBN's are readable with Cuecats when scanned into LibraryThing. A lifetime membership is $25 - that's unlimited books, forever - and a yearly membership is $10.
And we have that whole tagging coolness. And we're nice people who won't spam you. The end.
Lindsey, Assistant LT Librarian
John
· 2 years ago
Zack (and anyone with a Mac who didn't use Delicious Library):
There is no product called Delicious Monster, the product Delicous Library.
Delicous Library lets you use the Mac iSight camera as a scanner; you can use the external iSight or the one built into MacBooks and iMacs. No need to buy or configure anything!
You can scan 10+ books per minute
Ease of use is awesome
Particularly good for cataloguing the collection; actual indexing and locating in the house-I'm not so sure....
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
And yet another vote for librarything.com. They are continually adding foreign language support and foreign library catalogs from which to import the data, have gotten a way to get cuecats to work with their system, allow you to import and backup your catalog, and at least you can use tags to assign a location to a book as well as subject headings. For 3000+ books, you'll need to pay, but lifetime memberships are worth it in my view based on what you're getting for the money.
Fred Kiesche
· 2 years ago
My collection is bordering on some 8,000 books (hardcovers, trade paperbacks, paperbacks) (and that doesn't include eBooks!). Over the years I've used a variety of programs to track them; now I've got an Excel spreadsheet that I can export (DocumentsToGo) to my PalmOS PDA. Never got into scanning barcodes, etc., as I've been entering this stuff all alone.
The various programs and sites have been recommended by friends, but I can't see re-doing it all (plus Excel allows me to add whatever fields I want for my idiosyncratic needs) and paying for it as well. I have a system, it works for me.
My non-fiction is "sort of DD". Geology, for example is with geology, etc. Then it is alpha within a group. There are some other splits ("space and astronomy", for example, has all the observing books gathered in one area, so if I come in from the backyard I can grab a star atlas without digging for it).
Also, for the person who said particleboard will bend in the middle: That's true of any wood. Even something like oak will bend if you put enough weight on it. One thing I always see Norm Abram do in the New Yankee Workshop when he builds bookcases and shelves that hold a lot of weight is
1. Cut a 1/4" or 1/8" thick piece of plywood for the back of the bookshelf.
2. Where the shelves themselves will go, he cuts a groove (rabbet) in the plywood back that is 1/2 the thickness of the plywood (so if the plywood is 1/4" thick, the groove is 1/8" deep).
3. Fit the edge of the shelf in the groove in the plywood back of the case.
That groove allows the whole back of the bookcase to support the weight of the shelf. This is stronger than adhesives or fasteners alone.
Laura
· 1 year ago
Small point: the books that don't have LoC call numbers don't have to be abolished to a separate shelf. You can "assign" LoC numbers yourself. Decide where the book belongs, label it accordingly, and voila. Much better to have only one place to look when scanning for a particular subject.
The Phantom Reader
· 1 year ago
Anonymous asked if there is any place for DRM free e-books. As much as I think they are evil (I love the smell and analog practicality of real books), on a boat, I can see it being handy. You might want to check out these sites:
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
Project Gutenberg has over 100,000 DRM free books.
http://librivox.org/
Not e-books, but DRM free audio books, public domain works. Audio is just more HD space but I'd think an equally attractive boating option.
Enjoy.
Anonymous
· 1 year ago
So, we are a homeschooling family with about...1200 books and I had my fill of the "school room" a few months ago. We went to "IKEA" for our book shelves. They have a system called the Billy Bookcase system and they sell shelves that are sturdier than anything at the normal stores. They also go all the way to the ceiling with extensions. My problem is..How much weight can you put on a wall without worry? We are lining all our office walls with these bookcases and they are parallel to the floor joists. Should we worry about it?? Can the floor handle the weight in a 2.5 yr/ old "normal" home with, at one point, over 4,000 books?
donion
· 1 year ago
Zack, Thanks for this informative article, which I used in my own quest to catalog.
Extending your search for software, I finally decided on Books (for Mac) and here is my article on that.
http://domesticatedonion.net/eng/?p=78
Ross McPhee
· 1 year ago
Interesting read. I wasn't aware of Readerware.
beckwith49
· 1 year ago
Does anyone know of a way to track magazines. I have hundreds of periodicals that need to be indexed - not just the Title, Vol etc, but contents. I could use an indexing software, but that just seems to be way to time consuming.
HELP!
Dr. Minorka
· 1 year ago
There are fine open source alternatives. I think Tellico is the best. Has many predefined collections, but you can define your owns, too (with customs fields). Automatic import from Amazon, LC, etc. Keywords, etc. Some experimental barcode scanning with a webcam. actively maintained.
Anonymous
· 1 year ago
It seems to me both the article and the comments miss one of the things home libraries most have to deal with, which is the different sizes of books. My home library is probably on the order of 5,000 volumes, and I cannot organize them as I would like (by LCC) because for space reasons I must group books by size. When I worked at a large university deposit library, we shelved by size (I remember a big sign saying "Do Not Shelve Behind the Elephants" to which some wag had added "The Horses are bad enough"). At any rate, I often have a tall book that should go in the middle of a row of short ones, and I simply cannot afford the vertical space to shelve that way (as well as the potential damage to volumes when they are not supported all the way or at least most of the way up to the top). Can you imagine shelving St. Onge's miniature edition of JFK's Inaugural Address next to a full-size biography? The mind boggles.
ThePurpleSeal
· 1 year ago
I just found your blog, it was a great read! A while back i actually found a british labels company who printed me some sticky labels for a really low price. If you are at all interested then it may be worth taking a look at their website as they do all different types of label printing.
Leodis
· 1 year ago
A VERY INFORMATIVE BLOG! I am currently typing this while viewing countless of stacked books surrounding me that I organize several times before but with no continued consistency. Your system seems promising and worth a try. Thank You!
LUNA
· 1 year ago
thanks for share,the context is useful
Gem
· 1 year ago
Obviously I'm posting very late into the conversation but I didn't see a couple of resources mentioned that I find helpful. This site will give you a break down of how popular a certain LC designation is. This is particularly helpful since sometimes the LC# given initially is not the one everyone else decides is what should be used. Many times you won't notice too much difference. However, if you have a lot of books in one subject, sometimes you start looking and realize the order doesn't look right (quite of few of my vegetarian cookbooks originally ended up in general cookbooks until I realized what was happening). Also, this is useful for sanity checking your LC numbers. Someone mentioned cutter numbers. If you want to use them, this works pretty well.
Quite a few people mentioned LibraryThing which is what we use but I am a little dubious about a 3rd party organization (even a nice one) having my only list of books so I need to start backing up my data there on a regular basis. They also mentioned using some open source systems such as Koha and Evergreen. I originally dabbled with Koha but even though overly-complicated schemes appeal to me, I decided this was over the top. Also, then you have to take the time to catalog the data and download real MARC records (I suppose you could do brief MARC records but if you're installing a full ILS, why would you stop at part-way?). However, if you do/are going this route, make sure you take advantage of the z39.50 servers throughout the country Some of them don't allow anonymous access and some do, it just depends of the library's policy but even the locked down ones might be willing to make an exception if you ask.
Anonymous
· 1 year ago
Good read. I'd like to see a picture of what 3,500 books in a home looks like! :) ........
Anonymous
· 10 months ago
Delicious Library is a good choice, if you want to backup your DVDs to computer, try iSkysoft DVD-Library
W.J.R. Halyn
· 10 months ago
The image of the Readerware software looks an awful lot like an Excel screen, which can hold over 65,500 items PER PAGE! With up to 256 details per item. And it's free. Or, already included with your computer in most cases. I've cataloged up to 5,700 items in Excel databases, and that doesn't even slow it down. Plus, all manner of sorting and cataloging systems are possible, limited only by your imagination. It will also present your data in "Page" format per item, in addition to list-wise. You could even add a column-item for $COST of each book, and frighten yourself with your total bibliographic outlay so far! The only thing I can't make it do (and maybe someone else can) is multiple-connected relational databases. (But for that, use Access.) Anyway, I'm not here to plug Microsoft bloatware, but only to note you could've saved about $40 of your investment right off the top, and had just as much fun.
W.J.R.Halyn Edmonton, AB
P.S. - Your site was a pleasure to find. Everyone can spell, author AND commentors. Actual correct grammar is used. Easy to read at first pass! No waiting, no headaches! Thank you.
Paige
· 9 months ago
What would you do with a call number of CPB Box no. 2379 vol. 7 ?
I don't want to leave these out of my collection - these are earlier books from Kim Harrison's "Demon" series and I'd like to keep them in order.
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Zack Grossbart
· 9 months ago
Paige, The CPB Box number is a temporary number that indicates the LCC number is still pending. You can either wait a little while, or check another library to see if they have more up to date information. I like to use http://libraries.mit.edu/.
Elizabeth
· 9 months ago
I've read through all this very carefully, and I'm afraid I don't understand what it's for. Surely everybody knows that the correct place to store books is under the bed, and the one you want will be the one holding up the legless corner?
All Comments
Did you consider librarything.com, I have been using it for a few years now, and it seems to fit the bill for me.
Seriously, thank you for sharing your experiences in so much detail.
We've looked at this. (Like you I have one of those 'wife' things. And she brought nearly as many books into the marriage as I did.) The problems we ran into are:
A) We currently have about 20,000 books.
B) A great many of our books predate 1975 and perhaps most of them are earlier than 1985.
C) A lot of them are popular fiction, which is not the LCC's strong point.
D) And this was the killer -- the system assumes you can replace everything on the appropriate shelf in a timely fashion. Lazy slobs that we are, that's a major problem.
Still, you've given everyone a good overview of setting up a catalog system and that's much to be appreciated.
Since I only have about 8000 books, there's plenty of space for organizing subjects into a scheme that fits the way I think.
But you've got to plan for expansion!
My wife and I share your problem with 1500 books throughout our house. Now that you have an ISBN list please checkout Library Thing. A great catalog site for sharing etc. I am a big fan of "tagging" books. On Library Thing I am libri_amor.
Brian
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/06/02/dijalog.html
You can use your own software to lookup the LC info.
"epaper" book readers like Amazon's Kindle or Sony's PRS-505 are improving. you can store hundreds, even thousands, of books on one of these devices at a time. the main problem is that documents formatted for 8.5"x11" paper do not look very good on these readers. I would expect this to change in future models.
consider buying ebooks instead of hard copies, whenever possible, for future purchases. save trees, save lots and lots of space, and you can search for any text online.
in your copious spare time, consider scanning books that are all text (no pictures, diagrams, math, or code). the free ocr software tesseract has worked nicely for me.
http://library.dlwa.com
I have a shelving question. Are you just shelving things "randomly" as you go, and using some sort of notation to indicate the room and bookshelf that holds particular books? Or did you two decide some sort of room designation "the master bedroom will hold books on relationships, the kitchen will hold books on food, the media room will hold books on computers and the various medium, the baby's room will hold parenting books, the bathroom shelves will hold humor, etc." or what?
Just curious...
http://open-ils.org/
Likewise, use care not to overstress the contruction materials of your home (especially in an area prone to earthquakes) by arranging your shelving as stacks in one room (especially upstairs). (Yes, I've seen this turn up as a problem.)
Hmmmmm, I have one of those husband things, but have never been tempted to merge collections (except cookbooks, travel, and general reference). Congratulations on taking that on.
We are not trying to sort the books, but I have 2,842 books cataloged at this moment. And about 50-75 books were weeded out as duplicates. 7 or 8 shelves left to go, I'm closing in on the end of it.
1) books we will read many times
2) books we will read again, once
3) books we will never read again
4) books we will never read, ever.
Anything classified 3 or 4 goes to the used bookstore, ideally to be replaced with category 1 books.
This keeps our library a bit smaller, but it's still overflowing, much to my wife's annoyance.
We have all books on shelves organized by LCC number. This gives the books a good order for browsing and makes it easy to find individual books. We didn't tag or mark the books in any way. It is pretty easy to find books on the shelves, but we still occasionally look them up in Readerware.
When we add new books to the system we shelve them in LCC order. We keep a certain amount of space on our shelves to make it easier to add new books. It is important to have a good feeling for the types of books you tend to add so you know where to leave some slack. New book cases are added to the end of the system over time and the system will expand into those cases as we add more books.
-Zack
As for the foreign languages, some real library system like Aleph used in university libraries, supports them, but this would probably be an overkill for a home library, even an extensive one:)
Mine reorganized my books for me... by cover color. Chaos!
You may want to add child-proof to your system specs.
Greek, Latin, Russian, German, Science, History, Political Economy, Jefferson, Other
Cheap and easy. I can quickly turn to any category and be amazed at what I used to know.
The hard part is inserting new books onto the shelves -- that is, making the horizontal additions vertical.
Kelly
Before learning about Marc21 records, cataloging software, and other such things my wife and I labored on our own database using a customized Access file exported to HTML every few months. Talk about a PAIN. Mad props on the entry.
Personally I gave up a few months back and got the most recent version of Collectorz.com software, which in its newest version not only supports LC numbers but also has support for the Flic scanner (which you can buy from them for a price about what you paid). I've been slowly working through my books in the form of a couple shelves every month or so. My biggest problem has simply been that many of my older books don't have a barcode for the ISBN, so a large number have to be entered manually.
Try it for free; lifetime membership: $25. Obviously run by a booklover that is doing this for pleasure. (I am not involved in this site, other than a happy user. I even set up a separate account for books loaned out to friends.)
You can organize and display your collection many different ways. The cover art feature is especially cool. I hope you give it a try.
---------
Details: by inputting one ISBN, librarything.com will collect the following for me (except my tags and personal ratings):
Title
Author
Rating
Tags
Your review
Other authors*
Publication
Publication date
ISBN-10 and -13 (including multiples)
LC classification
Dewey
Subjects
Primary language
Secondary language
Original language
Date acquired
Date started
Date finished
Summary
Comments
Private comments
BCID
Number of copies
Citation sources
Entry date
Data source
Other members with book (count, ids)
Number of reviews
Popularity ranking
Average rating
For books without bar codes, did you print & affix them to the cover? (if so how/what did you use to affix them?)
For books without LOC numbers, did you 'invent' numbers or index on some other field?
1) Shelve books wherever you feel like at the time. Reshelve later in different places. This is the only system that actually works for most people.
2) With nice light, every so often quickly photograph the shelves with a nice digital camera.
3) This is the hard part. You need a "book spine aware" OCR/recognition program. First, it would be a program that attacks the specific problem of book spines. Spotting the border between spines. Converting the random sets of background and foreground colours to simple contrast for the OCR algorithms. Isolating and identifying the varying type sizes and orientations of spines. Knowing it only has to search in a limited database of known book titles and known authors and known publishers. Publisher Imprint logo recognition helping it a great deal.
However, it can also just recognize the spine by creating a fingerprint of the image, and comparing it to a public database of other people who have photographed the same book. (For libraries you would have to know to remove library catalog tags or just OCR them.) Like cddb, for books.
4) Now you can create "virtual bookshelves" on the computer, with real images of the real book spines, for browsing. You can browse by author, by LoC, by DDC, whatever you like. Then it tells you "That book is #20 on shelf #15"
This is what I really want, it's what we all really want, I think. The OCR system is hard, but all the basic tools already exist, little new research here, just software eng. I think libraries and used bookstores would pay well for it too, so go write it!
Not only would you be able to check out the books you wished to read, others could benefit from your generosity.
Solution: Delicious Library + iPod.
I scanned the covers of my books into DL, along with all the edition info and loaded it onto my iPod, which I take with me to the bookstores. When I find a book I like, I scroll through the pictures and titles and I know whether I want that particular cover or not.
However, DL is pretty limited when it comes to older books - took a long time to set it up.
You mention the difficulty in assigning one multiply categorizable book using a category system as a negative for DDS. Then you picked the LoC's category system as your winner. In my research, this came out as a wash because
* both DDS and LoC are subject categorizations
* both DDS and LoC can have multiple assignments for a given volume
However, your desire to classify foreign books more or less immediately disqualifies LCC for you -- the LoC is only expected to catalog books published in the US. Other books are cataloged, but there is no duty to do so. This is one of the reasons I went with DDS for the library at work -- there are DDS assignments for foreign works.
You mention that DDNs can be library specific. My research did not support this conclusion -- I found that there were published databases of DDNs, but these were priced out of my budget. Then I found that (1) the LoC assigns the vast majority of DDNs for US books (DC21, and similarly numbered authorities). I also found that your example interpretation of the DDS is not entirely correct. Given "641.3/003 21" in the LoC, "641" is the section, and an index of sections can be had with some Googling, ".3" is the rest of the assigned stem, and "003" is the optional continuation. "21", meaning "DC21" is the assigning authority (LoC, in this example). Thus, the book has any of these DDNs: "641.3", "641.30", "641.300", or "641.3003". The idea is that a library may choose to include or omit optional digits, depending on how many are needed to reduce collisions in the local library. Being a geek, I decided that we always include all optional digits in our DDNs.
I suppose the part that amused me in your article was your observation that LCC data was available, but DDN data was not. The LoC entries for their books almost always contain DDNs. I wrote the script that looked up DDNs in the LoC data from scanned ISBNs. So when you say you went to the LoC because you couldn't get DDNs ("but that system [for DDNs] does not provide programmatic access to their database and does not assign numbers to many of the books we own"), I completely fail to see the distinction you're trying to draw. DDNs are field "082", part "$a" in the LoC MARC (Z39.50) records. Fixed and optional digits are separated by a slash. The assigning authority is in part "$2". E.g. "082 00$a515.7/246$219" from "QA329.2.C665 1986", is 515.7 to 515.7246, assigned by dc19 (also a LoC desk).
However, there *are* DDNs for foreign books, so we got further in our cataloging than we could with LCCNs alone.
Beware ISBNs. There are known collisions and there is a propensity for number re-use for children's books. We found several "9876543210"s in our collection.
In my research I also discovered that Cutter codes are not part of assigned DDNs. (Probably doesn't surprise most of you, but it did me.) Cutter codes are published and can be had for a fee, but only serve the purpose of providing a short string for (roughly) alphabetizing by author's name. So we didn't bother.
We ultimately ended up with what we found in several public libraries: distinct collections for distinctly indexable materials: the magazines are separate (sorted by title, then date, labelled with an expiration -- add-ins are included with the issue with which they shipped and are labelled with the shelving and expiration information for that issue), the technical books are separate (DDNs and then by author), fiction books are separate (we didn't distinguish scifi vs. western vs. mystery because we didn't have enough to justify the trouble), catalogs and data sheets and corporate publications are together (sorted by the name of the issuing company (at the time of issue) with cross referencing inserts/dividers for companies whose names have changed, mutated, e.g. Aldrich vs. Sigma-Aldrich), ...
If only there were a coherent indexing scheme for all this stuff...
1. Get a cheap digital camera (you probably already have)
2. Print 3500 labels, each with a single bold large either consequtive or random number on it, on sticky labels using a regular printer.
3. Stick the number - photograph the book spine. Much faster than 100 per hour, I'd guess 10 seconds per book or less.
4. Dump one memory-card-full of lowest resolution photos to your computer.
5. Crop them automatically from a free photo/graphics program
6. Make a descriptions file to your numbered pictures of book spines (or first pages, for that matter).
Because you stuck and photographed the labels in order, numbered jpeg filenames will match those on the book spines.
7. Over time as you have your spare half-hours or free weekends, enter whateer info you'd like to make searches for into the one simple text descriptions file (e.g. topics/tags, author, title, ...)
3500 is so small a number, that this project will not burden you at all.
3500 is so negligible, you can avoid using any databases, and keep one file which is a numbered line with description per book, and simply grep in it for info.
You'll get the answer in hundredth's of a second.
No scanner, no work, just go buy a pack of labels for your printer.
Now, do yourself a small exercise : to locate a book about "red color", yes!
No classification is perfect! No one can make a perfect catalog. But a useful one that do 80% of the job possibly cost you 20% of effort.
Organize your book by chronolical order, after you read it, put it to the back of the stack.
Place all oversize book in one place.
If you are not satisfy : check out librarything.com
I catalog the same way a typical public library does: fiction by category and alphabetical within the category, non-fiction by Dewey number. I also second Eric's comments about DDS numbers; while it's true that the system allows libraries to have variations in a catalog number, this usually applies only to the highly refined subcategories (numbers after the decimal point). In general, a book will have the same number no matter what library it's in. Not that this means you shouldn't use LoC over DDS, but the objection you raise doesn't really apply. The Library of Congress site points out that the real difference between the systems is the underlying logic they use for categorizing.
My wife and I have several hundred books on our shelves, and I'm preparing to fully integrate them (heck, we've been married ten years...I think it's safe to say if she hasn't gotten sick of me yet she's not likely to!) this month. I'm not sure I need to invest in a major cataloguing system, but it'd be nice to be able to keep things organised. I found this article to be very interesting and it's given me some ideas. I'll need to get my wife to read it some time and see what she thinks.
Even with your sunk costs, you should check 'em out. They meet all your criteria, including #3.
I think Readerware is one of the best apps for personal libraries, and would recommend it to anyone. It's shareware, with a free 30-day trial, so give it a test drive. You can export it to a PDA, so I bought one--a Palm, which I take to the bookstores to prevent duplicates.
One downside is making a "to buy" list, for when you browse used bookstores--I haven't figured out how to store more than one Readerware database on a Palm.
Overall, Readerware is not perfect, but it's darn close.
http://web.mac.com/barrywoods/Site/Library.html
I'm currently considering Evergreen and Koha.
Ah, yes, 4-by-2s and 10-by-1s! That would probably be the only way I could get my collection out and available to me. And no, I have not counted them. But I don't have near enough, and there are very many authors I have yet to read, names such as Kalidasa, Li Po, Herodotus, etc, that should be in the list of any self-respecting well-read person! ;)
So I'm trying to come up with a workable digital solution. My plan is to get as many DRM-free books on a hard drive as possible (finding digital books we want to read that are DRM-free will be the stumbling block, not HD space) and they can be read using laptop, PDA, etc.
But I'm trying to figure out what kind of "database" I should use, or should I just do a search on the drive when I want to find something about woodworking, or Heinlein or whatever?
Any ideas on that as well as a source of digital books that are DRM-free (not just public domain books, but fiction and stuff that' current) would be appreciated.
Unfortunately, I tried a couple of library programs and got nowhere with this approach - one (possibly Libra, but don't hold me to that) scanned the barcodes and added the book 50 times, and I think I tried Libra only to discover that my camera is far too cheap to be acceptable to Macs.
Anyone else had more joy with this?
The second best way is to hire a retired or unemployed librarian with experience in a cataloging dept.
Myself, I used a similar system for my 3,500 books, but lost the catalog through a hard drive crash (and the backup CDs had failed, too... aaaarrrrghhh!). And now that I have Husband 1.0, the difficulty is merging the two collections together, as well as recataloging everything and deciding whose copy of "Digital Logic Design" we should keep (or both?) and other such things. :)
I hadn't really thought of a bar code scanner... I might want to look into that... though a LOT of my collection is pre-barcode, so it would only help on a small percentage.
Anyway... excellent article! Neat to hear that I'm not the only one with books. ;)
With that package I received the CueCat Scanner free and I used it to enter all of my books that had bar codes with no problems. I currently have over 2300 books and audiobooks in the database. If an older book has neither an ISBN nor LCC, you can always go to Alibris and find a book listed that makes it easy to do the grab and drop of the information from the website right into the RW DB.
I order quite a bit from Amazon and it was a nice option to be able to download my order history right into the database, then just eliminate those books I gave away as gifts.
Other features:
I have used both the Palm port and the Ipod port and found the Palm easier to view.
I very rarely loan books, and then only to those I trust as highly reliable to return them, but I like the Loan Tracking feature, to track where they went and when.
If the cover art isn't available with your autoload, you can scan in the jpeg and add it to a record.
I use the same bookshelves you found at Home Depot. If you scan the sale ads for Target , KMart, Wal-Mart, and others, you can find them on sale every couple weeks some where.
Good article of your process.
I'll add one comment about LibraryThing.
If you belong to an extended family of serious readers, having everyone's collections online and thus available to everyone else is extraordinarily handy for birthdays, etc.
It does have importing options, although I haven't looked into them.
I was part of the team that set up the UNLV Law Library in 1998. When we opened the doors for the inaugural law school class, we had statutes of 37 of the 50 states, with plans to acquire the remaining states' codes over the following two years.
Once in a while people would call and get angry about the fact that we didn't have a particular state's code, and they always seemed to think it was out of laziness. I call it the "Bridge Building Fallacy." It goes, "Hey, you wanna build a bridge? What's so hard about that? Just get some bridge stuff and put it up!" We are all prone to it when thinking about issues involved in disciplines the details of which we are not personally familiar with. Your post illustrates the problem from the point of view of a library very nicely. So far you've worked your way through about a third of your 3500 book collection, but picture doing 400,000! Not to mention that the requirements for a professional library catalog are much more complex than what you're dealing with. Hopefully people reading this will gain a little more insight into what it takes to establish and operate a library.
Readerware supports modifying its screen scraping of cataloging mechanisms for new/alternative catalog info sites, and also comes with numerous European information sites. I didn't have books in other languages than English, so I don't know how well these would work. (Readerware did retrieve some of my cataloging from the British Library.)
The backup format of the Readerware catalog is actually a zip file of sql and ddl for the java imbedded database it uses, and I easily modified this to restore the data to a different database of choice for a separate project.
Support is excellent from Readerware.
@Zack: Interesting that you chose the LCC solution. I thought about this when I was organizing my home library too, although I have no foreign books and probably about 25% of the number of books.
I looked into the LCC, and the Dewey decimal system, and how they were organized, and I realized that neither was really suited to the way I "felt" about the books.
Then I realized that there's a third system: Bookstore (i.e. category). And you know what? I spent a lot more time in bookstores these days than I do in libraries - which is why I have a lot of books. And I can usually find things in a bookstore pretty easily without looking them up first.
Now, at my level - say 700 books, I don't know the count - there are obviously a lot of subject-matter gaps. But that's actually an opportunity. I created an area for biographies; later, when that got too big to manage, I split it into personal biographies and "business biographies". That flowed into the business section, which is next to management, which goes above software management, which is right next to software, then math. Math is one bookcase over from language, but also one bookcase from physics.
Neurology and psychology eventually got split in two, with neuropsych taking up the middle, and Stephen Pinker sitting between neurology and language. And so forth.
In short, I created a spatial organizing system that fit the books to the space in a way that flows. I too bought the Flic scanner, and it's very cool - mine's got Bluetooth, so I can scan a bunch and then go to the computer later - but I never got around to the scanning, because I can instinctively know where a given book is.
Within each category, I usually organize alphabetically by author. I played a few games where it made sense - for instance, "How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found" simply had to go next to "How to Find Almost Anyone, Anywhere" (in fact, that's how they were shelved at the bookstore when I bought them).
You could have probably got the old version DDC 21 from a public library and for you purposes it would have been more than adequate to meet your needs. That said, LC is a fine system, and since you already went through all the trouble it should serve you well. Best wishes!
Contents of anthologies. I want to be able to search on an individual story and find where I have that story.
Collectorz.com was the only thing I could find at that has anything at all for contents. I won't say it is perfect, but it seems ok. My only alternative was looking like another home-brew effort, possibly using something like FileMaker, but that would have been a lot of work.
Yes, I have to manually enter all the contents, but at least it has somewhere for me to put them.
First, one of the biggest pains we ever had at the library was when one shelf overflowed with books and we had to move the books around to re-balance the shelves. When a whole section in the library had this same problem, it became a nightmare. Part of the solution is to make sure that you keep ample growth room empty at the end of each shelf, so that you don't have to re-balance, at least not very often. You also keep empty space for shelves at the top and bottom of each shelving unit, in case you need to add more shelves. And you leave space to add more shelving units at the end of each row in case the growth is really explosive. You can put oversize items on a shelf by themselves, or you can reserve the bottom shelf of each unit for oversize books.
Second, the LoC system does accomodate magazines and other periodicals. Each title should have an LoC number, and then each specific magazine should have a volume and issue number. Just put the LoC number on the box(es) in which the magazines are located, and then sort the boxes by year/volume, and then sort each box by issue number. Simple. The LoC system also accomodates other types of items, too -- including DVDs, videotapes, etc....
Third, you have to keep in mind that things are going to get messed up. People (including you) are guaranteed to put things back in the wrong place sooner or later, and you're not going to be able to easily tell it's in the wrong place unless you label each and every thing in your library. Library management software should be able to use a standard label printer (or sheets of labels in a desktop printer) and you can then affix the labels to the books, magazines, etc.... I would caution you to stay away from inkjet printers for this function, because they produce output that is water-soluable, and even a single drop of water on your label can make it unreadable. Of course, you could put tape over the label and partially address that problem -- unless the cover itself gets wet and the water comes in through the cover and behind the tape. I suggest laser printed labels and tape as the most secure solution. Note that the labels don't have to be big, just readable.
Fourth, when looking at building or buying shelves, keep in mind that books are extraordinarily heavy in large amounts. Keep your bookshelves on the ground floor or basement only, unless you have a certified engineer come in to check your house to make sure that you can safely store large amounts of weight in small concentrated spaces upstairs -- more than a few houses have collapsed ceilings because the pool table/work out equipment/bookshelves upstairs are just too heavy and concentrate too much weight into a space that is too small, and the construction is so shoddy that the building just can't take it. Don't ignore the cost savings of buying lots of commercial-grade storage, if that keeps you from having to buy and install replacement cheap-ass particle board bookcases every year or so. Also consider proper built-ins, if that's an option. Make sure all bookshelves are properly affixed to the walls for safety (trust me, you REALLY don't want a shelving unit to fall on you), and make sure that all freestanding bookcases are properly affixed with rods, bars, or some other sort of method to the units that are affixed to the walls, or are otherwise kept secure from any likelihood of falling over, even in a moderate earthquake.
Fifth, any decent library management system should also be able to use USB or FireWire webcams as bar code input devices, so that part should basically amount to briefly holding the item in front of the camera for a few moments while the software does the scan, then going onto the next item. Once you get a little practice, you should be able to do this part of the process very rapidly.
Sixth, you do want to keep a "new books" section, where you keep items that have not yet been entered into the system. You also want to keep a "Returns" section, so that you have just one place to go when you're done with a book. You can then go back every so often and pick up all the "returned" books and put them back on the shelves where they belong.
I'll check out LibraryThing, but I'm much more likely to use software like Delicious Library (despite the horrible name). Note that they support pulling information from six different international sources around the web, and the program is fully translated into multiple different languages. I might also take a close look at Koha.
My point here is that ease of use is key, otherwise you simply won't ever use the system. At least, you might use it once, when you're doing the initial setup, but probably not after then. You have to design this system for ongoing maintenance & operations, not necessarily for what's cheapest or what looks pretty. IMO, DL has all the hallmarks of a program that is both very pretty and also very functional. But we'll see.
At the library where I worked, we had a 50/25 rule. Each shelf should have at least 50% space available for growth, and if any shelf got below 25% available then it should be re-distributed or re-balanced. If any shelving unit had an average available space less than 25%, then we'd add more shelves at the top and/or bottom, potentially including completely unloading the unit so that we could squeeze the shelves closer together in order to add even more shelves.
When the average space available in a section got below 25% available, we would re-distribute and re-balance the whole section, including entire new shelving units at the end of each row, entire new rows of shelving units, or whatever else was necssary.
You may decide you don't need to use the 50/25 rule, but this concept is a good one to keep in mind.
But you should know your library best, and you should know which sections are likely to grow faster than others, and you should be able to plan accordingly.
You state that your local library system won't let you see the intricacies of the cataloging. The major library catalogs have a "see full catalog record" feature that will display the MARC format. You can also see the full catalog record on FirstSearch, the OCLC catalog. Since OCLC is the cataloging utility used by libraries worldwide (non-English and non-Roman alphabets, too), you ought to find all of your personal books there.
Personally, I'd rather spend my time reading (or quilting) than organizing our home libraries. Rough count for DH and me is 5000 volumes. We know what we own and we can find what we need. (Of course, DH is a former librarian and I am still a librarian.)
Let's just assume the books were $6 each (pretty cheap estimate), with a full inventory you'd get your $15,000 back to buy the same books or different again. And with a detailed list like yours you could actually price the books and find out the real replacement value which is probably higher than $15k.
Well worth the $500 to organize and catalog them. Great effort. And I can totally relate to the urge to build your own software. Heck I would have wanted to build my own shelves too. Way to restrain yourself to the project at hand.
:)
But: we do handle multiple languages, since we pull our bib' data from over 80 institutions from around the world, including the Library of Congress. (and Amazon, lest we forget!) Our site has been tweaked to understand Cuecat scanners' barcode gibberish; in other words, book ISBN's are readable with Cuecats when scanned into LibraryThing. A lifetime membership is $25 - that's unlimited books, forever - and a yearly membership is $10.
And we have that whole tagging coolness. And we're nice people who won't spam you. The end.
Lindsey,
Assistant LT Librarian
There is no product called Delicious Monster, the product Delicous Library.
Delicous Library lets you use the Mac iSight camera as a scanner; you can use the external iSight or the one built into MacBooks and iMacs. No need to buy or configure anything!
You can scan 10+ books per minute
Ease of use is awesome
Particularly good for cataloguing the collection; actual indexing and locating in the house-I'm not so sure....
The various programs and sites have been recommended by friends, but I can't see re-doing it all (plus Excel allows me to add whatever fields I want for my idiosyncratic needs) and paying for it as well. I have a system, it works for me.
My non-fiction is "sort of DD". Geology, for example is with geology, etc. Then it is alpha within a group. There are some other splits ("space and astronomy", for example, has all the observing books gathered in one area, so if I come in from the backyard I can grab a star atlas without digging for it).
Also, for the person who said particleboard will bend in the middle: That's true of any wood. Even something like oak will bend if you put enough weight on it. One thing I always see Norm Abram do in the New Yankee Workshop when he builds bookcases and shelves that hold a lot of weight is
1. Cut a 1/4" or 1/8" thick piece of plywood for the back of the bookshelf.
2. Where the shelves themselves will go, he cuts a groove (rabbet) in the plywood back that is 1/2 the thickness of the plywood (so if the plywood is 1/4" thick, the groove is 1/8" deep).
3. Fit the edge of the shelf in the groove in the plywood back of the case.
That groove allows the whole back of the bookcase to support the weight of the shelf. This is stronger than adhesives or fasteners alone.
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
Project Gutenberg has over 100,000 DRM free books.
http://librivox.org/
Not e-books, but DRM free audio books, public domain works. Audio is just more HD space but I'd think an equally attractive boating option.
Enjoy.
Extending your search for software, I finally decided on Books (for Mac) and here is my article on that.
http://domesticatedonion.net/eng/?p=78
HELP!
I think Tellico is the best. Has many predefined collections, but you can define your owns, too (with customs fields). Automatic import from Amazon, LC, etc. Keywords, etc. Some experimental barcode scanning with a webcam. actively maintained.
Quite a few people mentioned LibraryThing which is what we use but I am a little dubious about a 3rd party organization (even a nice one) having my only list of books so I need to start backing up my data there on a regular basis. They also mentioned using some open source systems such as Koha and Evergreen. I originally dabbled with Koha but even though overly-complicated schemes appeal to me, I decided this was over the top. Also, then you have to take the time to catalog the data and download real MARC records (I suppose you could do brief MARC records but if you're installing a full ILS, why would you stop at part-way?). However, if you do/are going this route, make sure you take advantage of the z39.50 servers throughout the country Some of them don't allow anonymous access and some do, it just depends of the library's policy but even the locked down ones might be willing to make an exception if you ask.
........
And it's free. Or, already included with your computer in most cases.
I've cataloged up to 5,700 items in Excel databases, and that doesn't even slow it down. Plus, all manner of sorting and cataloging systems are possible, limited only by your imagination. It will also present your data in "Page" format per item, in addition to list-wise.
You could even add a column-item for $COST of each book, and frighten yourself with your total bibliographic outlay so far!
The only thing I can't make it do (and maybe someone else can) is multiple-connected relational databases. (But for that, use Access.)
Anyway, I'm not here to plug Microsoft bloatware, but only to note you could've saved about $40 of your investment right off the top, and had just as much fun.
W.J.R.Halyn
Edmonton, AB
P.S. - Your site was a pleasure to find. Everyone can spell, author AND commentors. Actual correct grammar is used. Easy to read at first pass! No waiting, no headaches! Thank you.
I don't want to leave these out of my collection - these are earlier books from Kim Harrison's "Demon" series and I'd like to keep them in order.
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.