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Solving the Home Library Problem?
zgrossbart asks: "My wife and I have about 3,500 books. We can't find anything. All the books are in random order. We want to find a solution for organizing our books. We have a barcode scanner, but I'm not sure the best way to use it. I want a solution that is easy to maintain going forward and makes books easy to find. I also want the data in an open format. I'm think about using MySQL right now, but I'm open to other suggestions. What software do other people use to organize their home libraries?"
If you love something, set it free!
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
Dear Mr. Guy Montag,
It has come to our attention that you have a surplus of books stored at your residence.
We have already dispatched firemen to alleviate you of this horrible affliction--fire trucks will be there within the hour. For you see, special-interest groups and other "minorities" objected to books that offended them. As a result, books all began to look the same, as writers tried to avoid offending anybody. This isn't enough, however, and society as a whole decided to simply burn books rather than permit conflicting opinions.
There are other unpleasantries that books cause but there is no need for me to go that far into detail.
As you can see, your search for a digital Dewey decimal system is unneeded. And it is quite peculiar that anyone should have as many books as you do. Do not worry, though, we are a free public service!
Thank you again in your cooperation and trust that our services will be a valuable solution to your growing literary problem.
Sincerely,
Karl Rove Senior Advisor & Chief Political Advisor The Bush Administration
My work here is dung.
I bootlegged a copy of AV Cataloger and liked it so much that I bought it. I recommend it to all, but it is a Windows-based program.
/. readers don't like closed-source Windows-only software, so I'd welcome an F/OSS solution just like this. Until then, this is a worthy purchase.
I'm sure you can write your own, but AV Cataloger hits all the sites to gain information -- even Amazon for books. It also helps to keep track of what you loan to people (my mother is the worst thief my latest report shows!).
I know
I think you lost most of the slashdotters when you started with "My Wife..." People are googling this "wife" to see what they can find out about the phenomenon. Once that dies down, then maybe you'll get some results.
Seriously, the Dewey Decimal System has always worked for me. Unless you're running an actual "Go-ahead-and-check-stuff-out" library out of your home, the barcodes and MySQL seem like total overkill.
If you've got a Mac (a big IF, I know), Delicious Library is the way to go. I've not seen its equal for Mac or PC. Barcode scanning (I use a modified USB CueCat), auto-querying for book covers and other information, borrowers, and so forth. Works for books, CDs, video games, DVDs, whatever. Worth every penny!
Pick one of these methods of classification.
i) LoC classification.
ii) Dewey-decimal.
iii) Alphabetised by author.
I'd recommend (i).
Given the small number of fields (Author, Title, Year, Publisher, LoC shelfmark), you can store the information in a flat text file.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Crazy High Tech Solutions pale in comparison to old - school ones. Divide your book cases up Fiction and Non and categorize from there. Put the books most commonly read on easy to reach shelves. My parents have easily that many and don't run into any problems looking for the book they want to read. It is enough to have a vague idea of where the book is, History of Computing - Non Fiction around shelf 3 and call it a day. How do people find books at a bookstore anyhow?
With just a few thousand books I think a simple textfile might do. One paragraph per book. One line per data field (author, title, ...). Easy search in firefox with find-as-you-type.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
http://www.tnrdlib.bc.ca/dewey.html
Should cover every thing you need.
Be sure to print a number under the barcode so you can visually see a book that is out of place. Color coding labels by major subject doesn't hurt either.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Do what the book stores do, start with the master category (scifi / fantasy, gardening, geek stuff), then break it down by series or sub-category where needed, then by author. Should work for 90%+ of books, and the rest you can fudge.
My wife has several shelves of her books with different categories in different locations. She also has one shelf dedicated to Anne McCaffrey and one for Mercedes Lackey. I've got all my geek books on one shelf, and my general "to read" pile on another. It works fairly well for us, but we don't have 3500 books to start with.
I'm actually working on a project that EXACTLY fits your problem. Please check it out at homelibrary at sourceforge. I've only just started the project, it's not very easy to install right now, and there are a few bugs, but I started it with the exact problem in mind.
Do as the librarians do: divide the books into major subjects and then alphabetize by author. If you need to search by something else, Google is your cross-reference.
There is quite a large amount of open-source software available for library management. A full-blown ILS might be overkill for a personal collection, but I'd suggest checking out Koha and the listings at OSS4Lib.
We can't find anything. All the books are in random order.
Have a catalogue on your computer isn't going to tidy up and organise your bookshelf. SQL queries don't work on shelves. Unfortunately.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Unless you have a massive reference collection or are checking books out to friends, why bother with software? The solution to your problem is physical organization. Even if you can't have all the books together, you could organize them using LOC or Dewey, or something and label the locations.
//e. Printed little labels and everything. Why? Because I was 12 and had time to burn... I never looked at it again.
Having to update software everytime you move a book or add a book is just one additional step that doesn't seem to add any value.
When I was 12 I put all my books into PFS:File on an Apple
Have a couple of kids and you'll find that trivial stuff like this will be the least of your concerns - most of your possessions will be in random places.
"We want to find a solution for organizing our books. I also want the data in an open format. "
Dewey decimal system? Maybe one of you should pick up a degree in library science.
"We have a barcode scanner, but I'm not sure the best way to use it.
Aim the red light (the "la-ser") at the "zebra stripes" and wait until you hear a beep.
"What software do other people use to organize their home libraries?"
Hell, I read books to get a break from computers. I think if I had that many books I'd donate most of them to the local library. I know I don't have time to reread 3,500 books - there's millions more out there I haven't read yet!
Anything else I can help you with today?
Hmmmm. If only some highly organized groups of people would tackle this problem, then there might be a few possible solutions. I guess that's just wishful thinking...
This guy's the limit!
Shelf 1: Romance Novels
Shelf 2: Thermodynamics Textbooks
With all that steam, you can also use that room as a sauna!
--
Nanoscale Woodworking
It's as easy as that. I have about that many, and I can always find things. My mother has about twice as many, and she can always find things. You don't need high-tech solutions, all you need is a certain level of self-discipline.
High-tech solutions are also very brittle. If you have to tell the system whenever you take a book off the shelf or put it back on, then you'll lose books, because at some point you will forget, and the system will have an incorrect view of where the book is. Alphabetical ordering doesn't suffer from this nearly as much.
Plus: alphabetical ordering lets you browse. I don't know about you, but I don't want to figure out what book I want to read next by looking at a database. I want to do it by looking at the shelves, and taking them down, flipping through, looking at the cover, putting them back, etc. That's what books are all about. This is your home, not a warehouse...
I'm in essentially the same boat, thought I only have around 1500 books. I've started a project to catalog and catagorize all of them. I would suggest using Koha. It's an open source ILS (Integrated Library System) built on perl and mysql. It's being used worldwide (originally developed in new zealand). My library system (which i work for) is transfering the whole county to it, and I'm using it for my personal library at home.
The only advantage I can think of is for insurance purposes. You can backup the file offsite, and keep a list of your library to be replaced in case of fire or flood. A simpler way would be to take high re pictures of your bookshelves, which is what I did with my CD collection.
Really the best way is by author and then google the title or author when doing a search on a subject in a book he thinks he might have on his shelves. Then just find it by the author.
Oh You POS
I'm going to have to echo the "why do you need software?" calls.
Fiction vs Nonfiction
Break fiction down into scifi, fantasy, historical, or whatever else applies
Break nonficiton into computers, biography, history, math, science, etc
Then alphabetize categories by author, and label your shelves.
Use some cardboard to make book-sized dividers and write A, B, C, D, etc on them
...and that's all there is to it.
I use Readerware.
Spent a couple of evenings scanning in my books, it then went and got all the details from Amazon etc and I ended up with a nice database of all the books.
It was a bit slack on some of the old and obscure stuff - but if it's in an online bookstore, it will usually pick it up.
I haven't tried it for CDs or DVDs - I use DVD Profiler for that.
HTH
T
If a square is really a rhombus, why aren't all triangles purple?
this?
Dewey already figured it out for you.
There are a lot of replies about what software to use to track the books on a PC. That's cool and all, but it is very little help when you have to find a book on the shelves. I happen to own about 1700 books - roughly half the number you have. I think people underestimate the magnitude of the task - assume roughly 1m shelves, 3500 books of 2cm each require 70 shelves - that's over a dozen packed bookcases!
:-), my books immediately stick out amongst the pile of books in their own sizable library.
To keep things sane, I added a colored sticker (yellow in my case) to the spine of each book, marked with the first letters of the author's first and last name. Actually I cheat a bit, there are a very small number of categories I use - cookbooks, references - where I put a category icon instead. I put the books on the shelves ordered by the marker. This is loose enough that I don't have to think too much when returning a book to the library, but tight enough I can easily find anything I want. Another side benefit is that when I visit old friends (or mothers
As silly as it sounds....go to the library.
They have far more books than you'll ever do.
Look at how they've done it and do the same.
Basically, small PC, small DB, then get your stickers out, put a sticker on each book to be classified, on the sticker, write info such as Row and Column, enter it in the DB and place the book at the right place.
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
Failing that, if you've got the space, why not designate a room in your house the library and have nothing but books in it. You can sort books either using known systems, like Deweys, or simply by alphabetical order (yeah, I know, that sucks).
Here is the link: http://www.librarything.com/. This will help you with the cataloging of the books. As far as organizing, hrmmm, why not organize by color - that's how some women I know would do it :D
I know its already been said (at least once with about 3 people backing it up in that thread) but for the hell of it ill say it again.
:)
http://delicious-monster.com/
requires a mac of course, but then again - you know youve wanted to get a mac-mini just so you can keep your itunes library and all your book collections sorted on one machine
I have heard of lots of little applications for helping to organize your books and records and such, but I never understood how cataloguing your collection in a computer really helps you find that book in real life.
You can waste your time scanning in bar codes or typing in book and author names and such, the best way to organize large collections of books is just to take the time stack them alphabetically on shelves. If you find you don't remember what books you have, you have too many books, period. Give some away or sell them to a book store, you probably will never look at them again if you can't remember anything about them.
I don't think your solution can be found in software. Sure, you might be able to search for and find a book your looking for in a nice slick piece of software, but then where you last left that book somewhere in your home is the problem your having that software can't solve.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
You can sort each shelf, or group of shelves, individually. Then you can merge them together by comparing the first book of each group and putting the first in the order on the shelf.
I wrestled with this problem for a while myself, and came to two conclusions:
1) No software currently on the market did exactly what I wanted, and I should write my own.
2) Having a master list doesn't help in the slightest unless you can organize things without a database.
I suggest the following order of work:
1) Work out a category list. Do you want sci-fi and fantasy together? Where are you going to store cookbooks? How about technical manuals, encyclopedias, biographies, or textbooks? You can't make a good start at getting organized until you know what you're trying to organize.
2) Think about where you want to store things. Cookbooks should be near the kitchen, programming books should be near the computer, coffee-table books should be on the coffee-table, and so on. This will help more than anything else. Also consider shelf size: I built my own shelves, with some sized purely for paperbacks and some for hardcover, oversized, and trade paper. It's a lot more efficient than trying to fit everything together, which matters a lot with the volume of books you're talking about.
3) Find some software. Figure out what you want, what information is important to you. Personally, I mostly care about genre, binding, title, series title, number within series, authors, how much I liked it, and who I loaned it to (and when). I know someone else with something like 75 fields, including cover artist, publisher, who recommended it, number of pages, and so on. What you want to know about your books is pretty personalized, so you may not find anything perfect. That's why I wrote my own.
3.5) If you're going to write your own, set up at least the database and an entry system. If you're going to buy/download one, do so, and get it working. I hear a lot of good things about Koha, but I wanted to write my own.
4) OK, you've got your databasing system set up, right? You're sure it works, you have a place to keep off-site backups, and you're ABSOLUTELY SURE YOU CAN USE IT WITHOUT LOSING DATA? Re-entering more than a thousand books sucks, a lot. Yes, I've had to do it.
Well, this is the part that sucks. Take absolutely every book in your house off the shelf and pile it up in fairly empty room. Every book. Set up a computer near the door, and start scanning. If you can manage it, stack things in the room by category before starting ("OK, sci-fi/fantasy gets that wall, cookbooks can go in the corner, and we'll glue the romance novels to the ceiling"), and go by category. Once you've entered a managable number of books, go put them on the shelf they're going to stay on. Don't worry too much about where you put them: you're going to be shifting them around a lot. As you put each book on the shelf, make sure it's in the right spot relative to other books, but don't worry about which shelf it's on.
5) NEVER, EVER, I mean absolutely never, put books on the shelf without entering them. If you do, your carefully built database, built with your blood, sweat, and tears is totally worthless. If you must put them on the shelf, stack them sideways on top of the other books, in roughly the area where they ought to go. It makes it easy to tell which books need to be entered.
Anyway, that got a little longer than I intended, but I hope it helps. Sadly, the version I've been writing really isn't ready for an audience bigger than me, or I'd offer to give you a copy.
Just use librarything.com.
Make a free trial account, enter a few ISBNs, and once you're hooked shell out the few dollars for a full account and get rolling.
Tim that author is adding lots of data import filters and tagging options and other very geeky features, and an actual librarian has joined the project. (I know, I know: it's amazing seeing a non-commercial software service with a real-live subject matter expert! Just goes to show the author's not a real geek: he admitted that someone else's specialized knowledge might not be replaced by his own prejudices and SWAGs.)
Go, librarything, go!
If you have a specialty library, it can be completely useless -- imagine going into a library where every book was filed under '005' (computer programming). If you don't have a general library, Dewey isn't going to be as useful for sorting -- you'll want to look into a specialty thesaurus or ontology for your holdings.
As generalized libraries go, if there's a chance of moving it to a database, I personally prefer UDC, due to the way in which is handles sub-topics. (if you had something on the History of British Railroads -- where does it get filed in Dewey? History, European Countries, or Transportation Infrastructure? UDC maintains each of the facets, without needing 3 books of indexing instructions)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
One solution would be to put an RFID tag in each book, and then scan for them...
A more /.-friendly solution would be to interface your library software with your RoomBa, so you can sit at your computer, pick a book from your on-line catalog and then have one of your legion of house robots retrieve the book and bring it (along with a cup of coffee and an oatmeal cookie) to your comfy chair.
I've gone through the first stages of this project a couple of times (used to work in the RFID business) and the project always went awry at about the step of "Take all the books off the shelves and sort them."
One of these days (probably right after I lose weight), I'm going to drag all the books off all the shelves and sort them.
Anyone want to buy any computer science textbooks from the 1970s?
Cthulhu Barata Nikto
Don't you know the Dewey Decimal System????
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098546/
You need to take care that they stay in sync with what they describe. It follows the most important thing is to physicall arrange your books. It does not good to be able to find the book in your catalog, but lose it in your house.
So do what libraries do: adopt a standard system for sorting books onto shelves. You don't need the Dewey Decimal System. I'd say the best thing is KISS: all fiction goes alphabetical by author, then title. Non-fiction goes into groups that make sense for your collection, e.g. If 1/3 of your books are about computers, then you create subsections of Computers for Algorithms, Architectures, C, Hardware, Java, Languages (misc), Networking etc.
What you are designing is a hash lookup system with linear search to resolve key collisions. Since you're brain can't handle too much data (otherwise you don't need a system), you want the smallest number of categories that are nonethess large enough (in population) that you can put your finger on a particular book quickly. So, supposing 2000 of your books are non-fiction. 20-40 categories with an average of a fifty to one hundred books in them means you can find what you're looking for in about a minute.
After you've done that, you can create a databsae to cross reference (e.g. "Algorithms in Pascal" is under "Algorithms", but could be cross referenced to "Languages (misc)". However, I wouldn't do that in your situation. Instead, I'd shelve the book in "Algorithms", then take a piece of card stock, say a file folder ripped in half, and write on it: "Algorithms in Pascal, Dr. Bobby Bitbiter -- See "Algorithms").
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Subject groups (tech, fiction, business, etc)
topic (programming languages, hardware, databases, discussion)
subtopic (C, java, perl)
whatever
Leave room in each section for additions. Keep sections well separated. Move whole sections at once if you run out of room. Put large books somewhere else with a similar sorting method -- I have a separate shelf with large volumes in the same basic order, but all on the one shelf. I also used to have a separate shelf for O'Reilly books, as I had a collection of them which I would refer to more regularly.
When you put books back, if you don't have time to replace them correctly, leave them somewhere else, and wait until you have time, then reshelve them all at once. Basically do it like they do in a bookshop.
Unless you're lending books all the time, I can't really see the need to use a dewey system or some database, unless you really want to learn about library management for its' own sake.
One other solution I've used for my significantly smaller collection is to keep them in approximate acquisition order. If there's a specific book I'm looking for, I usually know approximately when I bought it. Doesn't work so well as books get older and less used though.
Of course, the other suggestion is to rationalise ruthlessly. Sell them, give them away, whatever. Even if you refer or read a book a day, that's 10 years worth of books, which could be used by someone else...
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
" I'm going to have to echo the "why do you need software?" calls."
I could to keep from buying duplicates. I have lots of books, and limited space, so a physical organizing scheme wouldn't do me much good. A digital scheme however would work great.
This is one of the more idiotic ask slashdot questions. It's like typing up a grocery list on your computer, a complete fucking waste of time.
Why don't you just alphabetize the damned books and go on with your life? It's just like a dorky geek to waste countless hours unecessarily using technology when a simple non technical method is perfectly usable and a hell of a lot faster.
Get a cheap label maker. Go lookup how the dewey decimal system works.
Stop being overly complicated, use the KISS principle. You DON'T NEED SOFTWARE OR A COMPUTER to organize your book shelves.
I mean, c'mon. This is just nutz, do it the way that professional librarians have been doing it for a long time now, because it works. You have 3500, not 350,000 books, use some common sense here.
Unless you are willing to put the time into setting up Koha or need more control and granularity of data (subject cataloging, cross-references, etc.), I suggest keeping things simple. OpenOffice 2.0's Base has a built in template for setting up a personal library database. Having done original cataloging of books for a library, I can say that you can spend a LOT of time cataloging just a handful of books if follow standard library practice.
It's all fun and games until someone loses the key to the handcuffs.
Outsource this task to your local library by donating all but your frequently needed reference books there.
Then you can easily browse the shelves, use a computerized search search system, or even ask a live person for help. You'll even been able to find books you didn't even own before. All for free!
Not only is it extremely capable, it's also beautiful.
There, that wasn't hard was it?
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
I just found this a few minutes ago, and it looks pretty cool. ISBN DB lets you feed in an ISBN via simple HTTP GET and it sends you an XML-format file with all the important card-catalog type information about your book. It wouldn't be too hard to combine that capability with a little script that'd read the ISBN barcode from your barcode scanner, download+parse XML, and save to a MySQL or other database. You'd still have to manually enter location data (shelf number or however you decide to organize things) but it'd save you a lot of time typing author/title/date/etc.
Two MySQL databases for handling multiple media types... typically used for lending systems, but can also be used just to manage your catalog.
DPL (Distributed Library Project) http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/dlp/ or http://sourceforge.net/projects/dlp - This is the software distribution page for the Distributed Library Project, a website which creates a distributed library of people's books, videos, and music. The project is an experiment in creating community and sharing information within a town or city.
OpenDB http://opendb.iamvegan.net/ - The Open Media Lending Database (OpenDb) is an extremely flexible application to catalogue all sorts of things including DVD, VCD, CD, VHS, GAMES, BOOKS & Laser Discs. Anything that you can collect and lend, you can catalogue with this system. The OpenDb allows you to add new types, by describing them in system database tables designed for the purpose.
"I have a cunning plan..."
You could just try organizing by subject and author, instead of turning it into a technological fetish.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I started out with Dewey, but found that in titles where I was overconcentrated (e.g. theology and especially New Testament) Dewey didn't offer enough granularity, plus you have to buy the books to really use it. Instead, I've gone to LC cataloging. This has several advantages:
- It's pretty well fleshed out for the largest libraries with the most specialized holdings.
- Most academic works (and a lot of non-academic non-fiction) print LC numbers in their front matter.
- For those that don't, just go to the LC website and look up the number they use. There are very few books that the LoC doesn't have. (One notable exception, for my purposes, would be Bible study curricula and the like.)
Be warned, however, that numbering your books is a heck of a lot of work, and not for the faint of heart."He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
But have you heard of this thing called the 'Alphabet'? ... and no, it's not a prime sports betting site.
Keep it simple, S...
If you're going to be using the barcode scanner for the books, set up barcodes for each of your shelves, tape them to the shelf fronting.
Whenever you or your wife decide to move books around, scan the book, scan the new location. If you put the book back on the same shelf, no problem, no scanning.
There've got to be some cheap or free inventory management systems available that include this capability, though I'm not familiar with any, since I don't do inventory controls with my library (which explains the ~150 missing titles and my well-read friends and family).
You should also set up barcodes for borrowers, treat them as a location. I'm not saying you should tattoo a barcode on their forehead (though the idea does have its appeal), but keeping a sheet of borrower barcodes in your inventory binder or in a folder somewhere would help.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Or at least this is how I hear it works:
1) Print out a sheet of unique barcodes on sticky paper
2) Stick one to each book shelf in your house
3) Use MS Access, Fox Pro, MySQL/PHP, Postgres/Perl, whatever database and scripting languge you choose so that you can go around your house, scan each bar code and input a tag that describes its location
4) When you place each book on a shelf, scan its ISBN barcode and the shelf's location barcode
5) Anytime you want to find a book, just look it up in your database and you'll see what shelf it is on
For extra credit write a script that, given a list of books you want to read, will calculate the optimal path through your house to pick them up.
Hmmm... right over there is my MySQL book.
Use technology to unclutter. Ditch some of the books.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Software:
Use something like Koha http://www.koha.org/ to create a real catalog and circulation system. Setup a cheap computer to use as a checkout station.
Physical:
Just guessing but with that many book surely you have a room in the house dedicated to your "library". Put up some real shelving so that they are orderly and won't be as easily damaged. Now shelve them in order using something like the dewy decimal system.
The added benefit is that you'll be able to check out books to friends and family and actually know who has what.
I know a lot of small libraries use solutions that involve FileMaker Pro. There are barcode generation programs, readers, and pretty much anything else you would need that plug into an FMP solution. Not saying it is necessarily the best, but people have been doing this with FMP for a long time, so the products are mature and full-featured.
Alphabetical by author. 3500 books isn't that many.
Dewey Decimal System FTW !
Appearently this is a problem a lot of people have been thinking about of late.
Checkout:
Library Thing - Catalog your books online
Listal - Social media cataloging
Both have tags, social aspects, cool entry, etc, etc.
librarything.com is a service that helped me organize my books. Of course, the bulk of the work is in actually alphabetizing them.
Find the books you expect to read again and put them on their own shelf. Store the rest out of sight, out of mind, or simply discard them.
My wife and I (same predicament) use Readerware (www.readerware.com) to track our 2500+ books and 300+ DVD's. With an active Internet connection, the barcoder will read the ISBN number and retrieve all pertinent data and add it to the database.
We can't find anything. All the books are in random order.
This reminds me of a large University library that i read about recently (though I've forgotten which one). Won't work at home necessarily, but an interesting off topic response. Their problem was that they were having trouble keeping up with reshelving the books in their stacks, and that many of their books in the stacks weren't being used all that often, so they wanted a denser storage system. The solution was a weird one.
They simply have a series of boxes which a conveyorbelt robot thingy can pickup, scan, and put back in random order. They put the books into the boxes in whatever order they come in. They scan the book, put it in a box, scan the box and when the box is full, put it back in the robot thingy. The books and boxes are in no particular order and a computer tracks what books are in what boxes, and what boxes are where. When a book is needed the robot knows where the box is and pulls the box. An attendant pulls out the book of interest, flags it as removed puts any books that fit into the box scanning as they go and sends the box back. An odd consequence is that the books and boxes should slowly get organized by popularity. It occurs to me that RFID might make this even better (ignoring for a moment the privacy concerns).
I agree with everyone who has pointed out that the Dewey decimal system is in use today because it works. Also, you tend to find all related material in one location, such that if you want a book you also tend to find closely related information, which leads to a sort of nice discovery process. However, if you tend to lead a disorganized lifestyle and want a database and want to use your barcode scanner a lot, you should be able to do it with this approach. No robot of course, but i envision a closet full of a series of barcoded file boxes filled with barcoded books, dvds cd whatever. The boxes are clearly labeled and stay in order. Stuff goes into a box until it is full but not to the point of not being able to see everything at a glance (eg. spines go up). As things go into a box, they get scanned, and the box gets scanned. The books go into whatever box they will fit into. As they come out they get scanned. When you're done they go back into whatever box has space, but get scanned into the new box. You then just need some software (probably recommended somewhere above) to track all the data.
Sk-
PS. This whole discussion is reminding me of Rob reorganizing his record collection autobiographically in High Fidelity. The order doesn't matter much as long as you can find things. However, certain organizations will lead to more interesting connections between material. It may be very interesting to look at what ends up next to what after a few years of this.
If you can't alphabetize your catalog and maintain that order over time, about the only solution that will work is putting an RFID in every book and then getting a device that can locate specific tags.
That seems ridiculous. I have had over 1500 books for several years and aside from buying an extra shelf and shifting some books every now and then, they stay in order and are easy to find.
I can just imagine the day when your RFID finder runs out of juice and you realize, "My, God. I have no hope of finding anything in this mess. Now if I can just locate some fresh batteries with my...oh, snap!"
My advice is to take 90% of them (as we know, 90% of everything is crap) and donate them to your school library where they might actually get used instead of just sitting on your shelves gathering dust.
But, you'd have give up the vanity of being able to say you have 3,500 books. :) So I doubt that most people will take this advice.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
A method I came up with for catalogging all my movies (which are not in random access order due to them being on spindles) is the following:
Each disc (or book in your case) is assigned a number. This number is purely arbitrary.
The discs (or books) are organized by this assigned number, so that given the number the item can be easily found.
The information about the item (author, title, publisher, producers, year of production, etc) is all stored in a spreadsheet with its arbitrary number being the row number.
Now, whenever I want to know where item X is, I simply open my spreadsheet (which is on a raid volume, and also remotely backed up everytime my laptop is booted.) and use the find feature for the title (or whatever other relevant information I have).
This may sound like heresy, coming from an English lit. major and book lover, but please consider lightening your load. The older you get, the more books you and your spouse will hoard until your house will start to look like one big, disorganized library with bookshelves everywhere. Every time you move, you'll have a truckload of books to pack up and lug in and out, and soon every wall of your house will be covered by bookshelves with the result that the walls will seem to be closing in on you. (Think Jacob Marley: "I wear the chains I forged in life.")
Start culling the books you've already read or never plan to read. Get rid of the biggest and heaviest ones first. Give them to friends, libraries for resale, Salvation Army, etc. Let your spouse box up books she thinks you don't need, and vice versa, with each of you reserving the right to rescue a few. Make it a goal to get rid of one book for every new book you bring into the house. If you decide a year from now you really want to go back and re-read "For Whom the Bell Tolls," you can check it out of the library.
You have two distinct problems:
1) finding a book you know you own.
2) finding if you own a specific book.
Problem no 2 can be solved by having a database of books.
Problem 1 can only be solved by organizing or books. It's no use to know thet you have the first book of the Foundation series if you can't find it!
You can divide your book by technicall and literature. Then divide the technical ones by subject.
Divide the literature ones by fiction and non-fiction. Then divide them by author ( in alphabetical order or not ).
OR
Go to the nearest school and ask the librarian! I'm sure he/she will have some good tips for you!
Get rid of most of them. You probably have them as a monument to your intellect, but is that really worth the space they take up?
The following strategy works for all your possessions, not just books. If it isn't
1) valuable
2) sentimental
3) useful
4) beautiful
chuck it. And if it's valuable but not increasing in value and doesn't fall under the other categories, sell it.
OK, a little off topic, but this is one of the reasons why I'm dying for ebooks (without obnoxoius DRM though). I move. A lot. About once per year actually. Books are a pain to move, and I'd love to just have them on a drive.
Doens't work so well for the coffee table though.
My wife and I have about 3,500 books. We can't find anything. All the books are in random order.
3,500 RFID tags, a scanner, and a pair of tin foil underpants?
If the books are out of order on shelves, all a db can do is tell you what books you happen to have - not where to find them. Even if you go to the insane task of cataloging your disordered filing, the moment you put one back in a different place, the db starts becoming useless.
The obvious solution is to sort them. By category and then by author is the obvious one but falls apart somewhat in personal collections where your interests mean you have huge amounts in certain sections and two books in others. The Hewey, Dewey, and Louie Decimal system gives you division and subdivision rules but takes a little more learning.
Once you have them sorted, barcode readers and dbs are fun projects for nerds but near meaningless for personal collections unless you want to loan books out or have nice sortable lists you can glow proudly over.
If you're totally unwilling to sort them - or know you'll never maintain the sort order - then you need to find some way of finding a specific object in a random collection. For that, much as it'll make the tinfoil brigade explode, a proximity triggered identifier and some kind of a scanner that bleeps when near whatever you're looking for as you swipe it over row after row of shelves sounds like your answer far more than a barcode reader (that's too slow even if you stuck barcodes on spines) and a db.
http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_attrib.php/page _id=1497/
What you do is simple... you take the books, line them up on these things called shelves and you put them in order according to the name of the person who wrote the book. Or you could put them in order according to size and color for a better decorative effect.
MadOgre.com
http://www.librarything.com/
Does it all, I do believe.
The person could have donated the books to the Salvation Army or a Thrift Store, or sold them to a used bookstore. Your response, however was spoken like a true extremist.
Must be a paid up Slashdotter!
Better yet, replicate the layout of the local Barnes and Noble store in your home.
First off, you really want the most used books in the most convenient locations. If you don't do this, then you will soon f ind you are to lazy to keep up with the 'library' system you started.
The next problem is shelving a space. If you do a 'local library' type system, then you will need good shelving and lots of space. This is annoying and expensive. The real big exclusive libraries do not keep books this way and neither should you. It is inefficient. Instead, after you have selected a proper software system to address every location on your bookshelves, take your less frequently used books and arrange them all according to size. That is right, pay no attention to subject, title or anything else, just sort by size. Then take your big books and put them on the bottom shelves. Adjust the shelves s o that shelf above is resting on the books below. Then stuff the next shelf. Repeat. You will now have your books stored in the least amount of space, and you can use cheap bookcases because the books themselves become structural load bearing members of the bookcase. It also looks very impressive when done correctly.
I can't believe that no one mentioned Delicious Library yet. ( http://www.delicious-monster.com/ )
Anything more, in terms of effort spent organizing (e.g., creating a database) is a complete waste of time that could be spent reading or acquiring new books.
Or, you could use that time even better by thinning out your book collection. If you have that many books with bar codes, your collection is relatively new (most of my books are pre-bar codes). If your collection is that new, a lot of it isn't going to stand the test of time. You should start being aggressive about eliminating books at this early stage because it gets way too easy to have books just for the sake of having them.
A couple other posters below have talked about going electronic etc. but they don't understand the concept of book collecting. Nonetheless, keeping your collection smaller is better. Create a set of rules for keeping a book. For example, a basic one is "Will I ever read it again?" Being collectible isn't enough--you need to provide additional criteria, like "It is collectible and it is an important work of British fantasy that I enjoy reading."
I believe it is better to have a small collection of treasured books than to treasure a large collection of small books.
Please consider joining Bibliophile on sourceforge, which is a collection of a lot of the other open source literature management software. The effort is fairly informal, but we'd like to share tools for importing, exporting, and cross-site searching.
(FWIW: I'm involved with refbase)
Take hi resolution pictures of all the shelves, then use character recognition on the images. (Some coding required.) I imagine you would have the picture of the shelf that the book is on pop on your screen with some kind of indication where the book is. Also a floor plan indicating what shelf it is. When you use a book you will have to put it back exactly where you got it from. No further organizing required.
seriously
donate all your books except the regularly used reference texts and the favorite ones that get read and re-read and support your local library.
the books will be there for you to use, and for others, and they already have a filing system.
tchao
This is a mere half of your solution. It's one thing to have a system that stores locations and organizations about books in question, but it's another to keep it up to date and acurate. Think about it this way. If a friend comes over and talks about a book you have and want to lend to him, would you (a) give it to him where you know you left it, or (b) go into the system, do a search, and mark it as lent to your friend?
:)
This system requires that every moval or removal requires you to update the system. Now add that your computer may not always be on, at the right location, may be occupied, and may not cover all of the locations of your books.
Why do people need systems when plain old pencil & paper would do quite well? Or even *gasp* using the alphabet
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
As has been mentioned, physical organization is probably the best bet.
But... Since this is Slashdot, we might as well discuss total technological overkill. The problem with a database is that, even if you have all of the books catalogued, it still can't tell you where to book is unless you are very diligent about keeping the book in the correct location, not much better than catagorizing your shelves, as others have mentioned.
But what if you built "smart" shelves with RFID readers? Then your database could be constantly updated with the correct location. Tables around the house could even be wired in.
Probably impractical becuase of RFID ranges and the number and cost of readers needed. But that seems like the level of technology you would have to use to make things much better than normal organization skills.
Spencer Ogden
I happen to work for a company that makes software for libraries to do exactly what you want to do. Unfortunately, our product is closed source and can be pricey, so i'm not going to recomend us, unless asked. However, i will talk about various options.
As far as your rant about open standards goes, the libraries already have one. It's called a MARC Record (MAchine Readable Cataloging). A MARC Record has every piece of information you need, and call all be found using the ISBN on the back of the book. The ISBN is also the easiest thing to use to find MARC records. As a point, our program will completely catalog a book for you with just an ISBN.
Unfortunately, a MARC Record has WAY more information in it they you probably need. Remember, this is meant for librarians. Also, the format of the MARC Record is nothing to be taken lightly. There are lots of programs to retrieve and store MARC Records, including some great Perl tools that can be found in CPAN.
If you're a bit of a DIY person, you should be able to whip up an interface with enough information fairly easily. You basically could just use any database to store the information from the book you need, which can be retrieved from MARC Records using the ISBN. Just also store the location of the book somewhre, and you should be good to go.
i've seen a few open source library programs out there, but i don't know how well they work. i could speak volumns about all the little aspects of library automation software, but they are WELL above what your needs probably are. Librarians have to be able to produce lots of rports on every aspect of the library in order to secure funding and such. That's why most of the of professional product and be so pricey.
If you want any further advice or specifics about anything, i;d be happy to help out. You can send me an email.
There's really no substitute for Delicious Library for Mac. It has bar code integration and pulls book covers from Amazon. I use it to manage my library and really couldn't fathom not having it.
Find me in ~/.sig
The program delicious library is awesome for managing your books. It is a Mac program only, so if you don't have a Mac, this post is useless to you, but if you by chance do, its definately worth a try.
How will organizing the shelves help when you're in the middle of a bookstore and are wondering if you already own a certain book? I can't remember all several thousand books I own - having a digital reference on my PDA is invaluable.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
buy a freaking bookcase and learn the alphabet.
This is like saying, "I have a car and a garage and need some place to keep my car dry when it rains. Slashdot can you help me?"
My wife and I also have an inordinate number of books. Part of our solution was to choose a wall in the house with a lot of space and build a bookshelf right on it. We ended up choosing a large wall in the living room. It goes from wall to wall, ceiling to floor, except for an archway into the dining room, and integrates into the room with baseboard and crown moulding. It looks like it's part of the shape of the room. This gave us roughly 7 feet vertically and four 3-foot-wide sections. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it, because it looks better than movable bookshelves, although we still have plenty of books on other shelves elsewhere.
Order from Chaos : A Six-Step Plan for Organizing Yourself, Your Office, and Your Life
Seriously, if you have kids, do them a favor and get rid of a lot of them. My father died and left truckloads of books, it is a curse.
libraries have been using it for decades.
If you could scan all these books and store them in a searchable database?
No Sigs!
Hi,
Try Koha http://www.koha.org/. Both Windows and Linux versions.
Used by a number of libraries already.
As many posters have pointed out, you don't need software to organize your (physical) books so that you can more easily find them, but what it will do is to help maintain an inventory of the books you own. When you've got a library that large it's impossible to remember what books you own, short of going and locating the actual book. If, god-forbid, your house should burn down (as happened to me) your insurance company is going to require an inventory in order to reimburse you for your losses. Having a pre-prepared book inventory (stored off-site!) sure beats spending hours sifting through ash heaps that used to be bookcases looking for page fragments with a book title (or best of all an ISBN).
Quite frankly, 3,500 is not all that much - I've got more than that myself, and can find just about anything in a matter of seconds. My books are neatly organized by topics. That's all that there is to it. I would advise the guy who posted the story to physically organize his books first, and then see if he still needs a software solution. I don't think he will.
... right here for those who are too impatient to Google for it.
It seems a bit pricey for a home library, given the plethora of other solutions mentioned in this discussion that are low- or no-cost.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Some insights on using Dewey:
I classified my library of about 1000 books using the Dewey decimal system. It's great! I deviated from the strict classifications in the 800's (fiction), there I just alphabetized by author's last name. If you do the 800's strictly, you'd be seperating your fiction by country of origin, which makes it harder for find a book later.
I agree with the earlier poster about how a library specialized in computer stuff can get overloaded near the front. But, you know, if 25% of your collection is about networking and programming, then so be it. You're going to have 25% of your wall space be about computer crap no matter how you arrange it. (And after 5 years, it's mostly outdated too, if it's anything like mine.) So it might as well be coherently organized.
Yes, 005 is for all computer science stuff, but 005.13x is for traditional programming languages, 005.27x is internet and internet programming, 005.447 is for networking, 005.75x is for databases... please don't throw this back at me if I got those numbers wrong, but my point is just that Dewey is designed to allow for classifications, sub-classifications, sub-sub-classifications, as far as needed. And if you don't like the way it looks when it's on your shelf, you can always rearrange all the 005's to your liking, like I did for the 800's (see above).
Has anyone posted on how to get Dewey numbers for books that don't have them on the title page? I did it at the Library of Congress website. Click on "basic search", search on the title, and click on "Full Record" when it comes up.This will give you the dewey Decimal number.
I did about 10-20 books a night until I was through my library. This may sound like a chore to many, but if you have 3500 books like you say, then I expect you'll find it to be a labor of love. It is surprisingly entertaining to see how books will be categorized, and how two books that you read 20 years apart that you never thought of as being related may land right next to each other on the shelf.
Good luck & have fun.
Okay, now consider the time it would talk to learn or create a database (not a big deal really). Then consider the time to enter the info for each book into it. Sure, the author and title, but what about subject? Ooooh, you're halfway through and realize you need to recategorize 200 books because you too specific or not specific enough. Do you want to include a summary? That will take forever. Maybe you need some speech-to-text software. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 is really cool. Spend a couple of hours getting it used to your speech pattern, and you're off and running. Of course you'll still have to check for errors.
Okay, you've spent a month of your life organizing this beast. Now you can look up books and actually locate them. Are you going to remember to put in new books? If you ever get rid of any books, are you going to delete them.
And here's one to ponder: If you're so lazy and disorganized that you can't spend a Saturday afternoon rearranging books by general subject so you're only looking at 2 or 3 shelves to find a useful book, when you do find a book you're looking for and have had it out for a week, are you really going to look up where it came from and put it back? Of course not. You're going to throw it into the first free space you find, just like you did with all the other books in the first place.
But if you must, you must. I actually did this 20 years ago. I moved away for college and stuck around for a couple of years afterward before moving back home for a while. I had like 15 boxes of books which went straight into a storage locker. My mom had bought an Apple IIe with AppleWorks, and after playing around with that a little bit, I decided to make a database so I could locate the books in the boxes in minimal time. It worked great. Funny thing though. After logging each book, I had a pretty good memory of where each one was, and I didn't get much use out of the database.
When I got my own place and put all the books back on proper shelves, I didn't go so far as to sort by author, but I'm a clumper (organize by piles) and just loosely grouped like books together. Still works to this day, with roughly 2200 books. I've got the web shelf, the programming shelves, the language shelf (dictionary, thesaurus, etc), the foreign shelves (Spanish and French books, travel books), the fiction shelves, etc. Having organized them myself, I know just where to look. But if I just put books wherever without any organization, I'd be as lost as you.
My two cents.
Cheers!
That's a total no-brainer.
Delicious Library. Period. No other Library programm or solution comes even close. It's the companies only product, sells for 40$ and it's a programm that justifies buying a Mac just for the purpose of running it. It's that good.
It has everything you could wish for and loads more. Among the most notable features are bot's that spider the web (amazon, etc.) for meta info on your books based on the barcode (including grabbing cover-pictures), option to use a webcam as barcode scanner and exports to data formats of your choice.
Really, looking any further is pointless. DL+Mac Mini+Barcode Reader or Webcam will take you farther than any other solution you could even dream of.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Finding a book is like ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method):
until I find what I want. Very quick and easy!8-)
http://www.delicious-monster.com/
When I bought Delicious Library, I wound up spending all night scanning in all my books.
Note: some items trigger easter eggs when you add them to your library.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
The small research institute that a work at uses a remarkably simple system. Books are assigned a serial number based on when they hit the shelves, and are filed simply in order of this serial number. Filing in easy. Finding is easy. A very simple data base... probably even a text file with appropiate keywords or tags could be searched with something like grep to retrieve the serial number. A disadvantage is that similar books will not be grouped together (at least on the shelves) and you will lose some of the pleasure of browsing your collection.
After months of me planning on building a home application that would include a desktop, web, and PalmOS component and never doing so, my wife and I finally gave in and purchased a license for Readerware. It's written in Java, so it's cross-platform. I tried the server component but I wasn't too impressed by it, since it required X to run (and I prefer not to run X on my server). It can connect to many, many different bibliographic databases (including Amazon's), and can search all those databases for books based on ISBN numbers. It can also accept input from a barcode reader, though I haven't tried that.
"A statesman is a dead politician. Lord knows we need more statesmen." Opus
It IS wrong to throw away anything that still has a useful life.
Yeah but it's Piers Anthony...what else are you going to do with it?
The problem with standard classification schemes (Dewey-Decimal, LoC) is that they were designed at a time when *physical* search was important. You asked the librarian where the books on topic X are located, then you browsed the actual shelves for the books of interest.
As recently as 10 years ago, the only thing that had changed was that instead of asking a librarian, you queried the 'electronic' card catalogue at the library, got a few locations, then, again, went to browse the actual shelves for useful books.
Electronic databases with useful metadata and search have changed all this. If you wanted a book on a particular subject, you'd search Google or Amazon and create your reading list while sitting at your computer. The only *physical* function remaining is to retrieve the books on your list.
In this environment, you could literally index the books randomly to numbers (book #1, book #2, etc) and organize them in ascending order on the shelves. All relevant search info would be in a database you could query on your computer.
As for the database, it seems like such a natural candidate for a community effort like the (original) IMDB or CDDB (now gracenote) that there must (should?) be something out there already.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
One cool thing about Delicious Library is that one of the pieces of information it pulls from Amazon is the resale value.
If I'm not mistaken, it also has some means of putting items in your library up for sale via Amazon. I don't know how far that automation extends, however - it might just bring up a relevant page at Amazon.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Separate the books into technical and fiction. Then group the fiction books by author. Group the technical books by subject. Don't make it difficult or cumbersome. Trying to maintain a database of books is not going to let you find them easier. Using barcode readers and other technical solutions will just take more effort and in the end you will still need to organize your books as above.
Tellico is an excellent solution. Easy to use, open format.
http://www.periapsis.org/tellico/
Does cost something, but I found it worth it, just to ease the import
Especially useful for books w/ the bar codes, I can zap em and then just verify results, much easier
I store em by shelf, then indicate which shelf they are on within the readerware software.
In help, indicates that DB is usable without the software, but I find the software works well for me (1200 book so far, got another couple shelfs to go though)
http://www.readerware.com/
I did the unthinkable and purchessed some software for windows.
Like you I wanted to use a barcoder to make my life easier. This is the product I used http://www.collectorz.com/book/. I was pleased with the result and my wife can use it easily.
Don't you know the Dewey Decimal System?
"A coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one."
I have a large book collection, and purchased a program (which I love) called ReaderWare. It will let you just imput a bunch of ISBN and LOC numbers and then will go out and get the details of each title for you from on-line booksellers like B&N, and Amazon.
It also has lots of standard canned fields that sound like you and your wife could use (Location being one of them).
So given how many books you have, find a cheap bar-code reader (old CueCats work fine with it) and spend a nice quiet weekend cataloging all your books automagically...
http://collectorz.com/book/
I've used their software to catalog my collection of approx. 1500 CDs. It doesn't come close to the visual beauty of Delicious Library, but it is very powerful and easy to use. The pro edition is $40 but well worth it. The company is very responsive to user input and is very generous with their licenses (free upgrades for life, discounts for multiple items purchased, etc.).
http://www.koha.org// You can run it on linux or window. It is worth a play if you have the time, runs on mysql, apache and perl. I use it at home and have used the z3950 interface to copy catalogue from the library of Congres, etc. For a normal person I think http://www.librarything.com// is the go.
Readerware has everything you need - http://www.readerware.com/.
Scan the barcode of a book or enter the ISBN, it does the rest. If you scan by location, it can record that information too as you go. Runs on Linux, Mac even Windows.
It uses an open source database, http://hsqldb.org/. Don't think it works with MySQL, but you can export the data from Readerware.
http://alexandria.rubyforge.org/ for all your library needs in Gnome
4 /ossfeatures.html
http://creativelibrarian.com/library-oss/ Some ideas
http://www.koha.org/ what my wife uses in her library (she is an MLS at a state library)
or...
http://library.rider.edu/scholarly/ecorrado/il200
wow, that took me all of 2 minutes and a Hot Pocket to look up.
My problem is like his, only they're e-books - a 200GB HD full of 'em.
It just doesn't matter how much indexes, desktop search thingies, databases or whatever you have, it just can't find the books as easily has having them sorted by categories/publisher/title/topics/whatever.
I was just filling up drives with indexes and stuff, and I had a big "mashup" page of index search results and such, but it's still faster to just categorize/sort them.
Perhaps a database with all the relevant infos (keywords, etc) would work better, but for all the books I got, I couldn't do that in a lifetime.
If you are running Mac OS X, Booxter is the best book cataloging program out there. It tracks all sorts of attributes and connects to a lot of different web sites to get the book data (Amazon, but also Library of Congress, etc.).
You can create smart lists (like in iTunes) to categorize your books. And you can scan barcodes with a handheld scanner or use an iSight - pretty cool. You can export to XML also.
I keep thinking of something like an automated tape library - a vault arrangement with a computer-controlled arm inside that has a barcode scanner mounted on it. Have it catalog all of your books, then just search for the one you want and let the robotic armature retrieve it for you.
Come to think of it, DLT tapes are pretty big; I wonder how hard it'd be to modify a DLT library to accept paperback novels.
I can't speak for scalability, but I have used this application in the past for my DVD collection (which is nothing compared to your book collection):
Alexandria: http://gnomefiles.org/app.php?soft_id=110
(the homepage seems to be down, the above link is for gnomefiles)
I also noticed this:
BibShelf: http://gnomefiles.org/app.php?soft_id=329
Good luck.
Sorry, I think I'll go with the monster, here.
There have been some good suggestions about sorting the shelves and so forth, which will work great with physical books. But I have been looking for a solution for a growing ebook collection that I have. Sorting these is difficult enough, but having a "card catalog" type of database precents a different set of challenges. For instance, many of the ebooks, (pdf files) I have are not commercially available texts, and thus do not have an ISBN. And also, since their is not a barcode, barcode scanners would be useless.
"I was me, but know he's gone" Metallica, "Fade to Black"
Why not follow the Dewey Decimal System or Library of Congress classification?
OK, I love books. I have old books and new books. Books with titles like, "Someday Sarah" and "The Autobiography of Chester Lantham". I love the smell of books, the feel of their pages. I love opening a book and finding a note someone left there in the 1940s. I've found currency in books, doodles, love notes, and what appears to be a rose petal. I love the feeling of peace when I sit in my library amongst my books; they're like shields against ignorance and apathy thundering down from all around.
So it was with great sadness when I realized I would need to give away at least some of my books. They started to creep up to 3000 volumes. To put this in perspective, it's several walls worth. I had boxes in the garage and boxes in my office. The computer books weren't the problem. It was easy to part with "Introduction to OS/2" and "Working With CP/M". It was not so easy to say goodbye to a first edition, "Running Linux" or Locke's "Two Treatises of Government"
But I realized that I no longer have the time or space to ever read them. And as much as I enjoy books, I hate it even more thinking that some beautiful words would end up being pulped when I depart for the great Library in the Sky.
And not just beautiful words, but beautiful ideas, and beautiful ways to solve problems. Books aren't worth much hidden away in a private library. Their worth is entirely in the reading.
So unless you're planning to read all those books, have you considered giving them away or selling them on Ebay?
Connan the Librarian says "Havent you ever heard of the Dewey Decimal System!?!"
As others have pointed out, don't waste time with bar coding your books and stuff unless you plan to lend them out a lot. The whole reason for bar codes in libraries is so they can easily keep track of who has what without having to do a lot of data entry. Just scan the library card, then scan the bar code. Done, your record is updated with what you have out, and their record is updated to indicate who has that book, when it was checked out, and when it is due.
Unless you've built stacks in your basement or something, some kind of strict organizational scheme isn't going to work well either. Like another poster pointed out, in the home you organize by available space.
So...
Here's what I would do. Give each room a unique tag, preferably something memorable (e.g. Dad's den, south study, etc). Then give each bookshelf in the room a unique (to that room), human readable tag. Then you can roughly decide what goes where based on subject, genre, etc, but you don't have to be strict about it. Organize each shelf-o-books alphabetically by author.
Finally, you can construct your database. All you need to input is the author, title, and a few tags (genre, subject, sub-genre, anything semantically descriptive, really - this could even be "sharks with frikkin lasers" or a memorable character), and most importantly the room and shelf. You'll have to do a lot of data input initially, but there's no way around that even if you use your scanner to scan UPCs (especially since I really think you want your tags to go beyond the standard LOC catagorizations - to be effective they MUST be things you would think to search by). This, I think, will give you what you really want. Namely, it provides a way to quickly locate any book you own (also a good way to avoid purchasing duplicates). And it gives you flexibility since you aren't strictly locked into grouping like items together. The only downside is it is a lot of work. It may be more practical to just organize your rooms and shelves somewhat mnemonically and forget the database all together.
Yup. Better not throw away all those damned nuclear warheads that have hundreds of years left in their "useful life".
::goes back under the bridge::
Okay, thats enough of that.
And I've got thousands of music albums on HD, with metadata in a Postgres DB. Others have thousands of movies. The hardest part is replacing a shelf of titles with something as easily browsable (not just searchable), especially at scales bigger than traditional libraries handle.
So who's got a content GUI that's better than walls of shelves?
--
make install -not war
http://www.tnrdlib.bc.ca/dewey.html
seriously, if you cant keep them in an order, barcoding won't help you find them.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Speaking as someone who works with data and databases for a living, and loves to program, and has a large library... forget the computer.
Unless the data is kept up to date (adding books, location of books, even if you lend a book, to whom, and when...) it's not spectacularly useful.
I used to have a problem finding books in my house.
The main problem was that they were in too many places. Or, to look at it another way, too many too loosely defined small collections.
I thought about a catalogue, but what worked for me was to turn one wall of the den into bookshelves. That was a good start.
As has been pointed out by other posters, shelving them by author alphabetically works really well. I have no problem finding books any more.
We broke a couple of small genres out of the main group - text books, history,
biography and autobiography, reference books. These have their own shelves or shelf units, and are arranged by loosely by topic.
The whole point is, don't take on a lifelong job of data entry in order to make finding books easier. Organize the books in a way that's natural to you and as simple as possible.
IF you can't remember if you have a book, are you actually reading it? or are you just skimming through the pages so you can get to the next book?
You make a valid point, but that doesn't answer his query, which was how to find one of his books in his collection.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm a librarian, and believe me you're making this harder than it needs to be. Barcode scanning is great... if you want to check material in and out. LOC/Dewey organization is great... if you can spend several minutes per book assigning catalog info and creating your own cutters. You're dealing with a home collection; your main concerns are shelf space and a functional order. This may sound radical, but forget subject headings; it's unnecessary for something this size. Just get them in alphabetical order, either by title or author last name. At most, you can separate them into 2 or three different size categories for easy shelving --oversize, "regular", and etc (unusually thin or loose pamphlet-type material, books w/ CD-R cases or other packages.) For my home collection, size is the primary sorting category -- it's easier to move around when your stacks are pyramid-shaped. It's amazing how technology can be not only sophisticated, effective, and simple... but that sometimes it doesn't even need electricity. Go figure.
I used to collect books, with some kind of unconscious desire to have more books than used to exist in the library of Kaslo, BC (pop 1000). After I acheived that aim, I started to realize all the books were doing was filling up space and making my moves more difficult, so I started to:
1. use the library more;
2. only buy books I really want to read over and over;
3. give away a lot of my SF and Fantasy books that I wasn't seriously collecting to friends who would appreciate them;
4. profit - ok, started selling at Half-Price Books in Seattle and now my girlfriend has me using Amazon.com to sell some too.
I still keep some WWII Edgar Rice Burroughs books, encyclopedias, kids books, computer books, and pr0n (literary, no pics), but I have to say it's slowly making my life more manageable.
But I do buy books, just don't keep them as much.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
With only 3500 items you could keep track easily in an Excel spreadsheet! You don't need a database. You could have columns for title, author, and location in your house. Problem solved in 1 night!
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Barcode scanners?! MySQL?? Just organize by genre/topic and then by the author's last name...(are you planning on handing out library cards too...) ....
I have that many - I cache them in sequentially numbered boxes and keep a text file of
Box# - Author - Title
I can edit the text file, search, find the box quickly, and put a post-it in the book while I'm reading with the box number to return it to.
With only 3,500 books, why bother with anything else? If later you get to 10,000 or so, you can convert the text file to CSV and import to the database of your choice.
I manage my books and CD's with Readerware and a portable scanner with a USB interface. Very cool.
Doug Jensen
I use Readerware for the same issue. Use a barcode scanner to grab the ISBN/UPC code. The software organizes by looking up the book in various places, e.g. Amazon, Library of Congress to get the title, picture of book cover etc. Saving the catalog to a file to carry in a PDA while at the bookstore is also possible.
Significant efforts are being made by Google and Amazon to scan all books, furthermore it will only be a matter of time before electronic book readers will find a favorable form factor and price. It's going to happen, it's just a question of when. So if I were you, I would begin to sell off all of those books while they are still worth something.
Although you should probably keep the rare books and those with sentimental value... but everything else is just wasting your space and time. Seriously, you are going to spend time to write a personal library tracking app? That's a clear sign to me that you have too much stuff.
Personally, I am in the long arduous process of scanning most of my material possessions. It's a lot of work and yes, it's sad that I wasted money buying these "things" in the first place, but when I am done it's going to be a wondrous thing. With all my data on a hard drive, it's portable, back-up-able, searchable, and pretty much as convenient as possible. It's like a librarian's wet-dream.
The way I look at it is: I only have a certain lifespan in which to read books, and the quantity of great books is already such that I can't read them all.
Hence, I tend not to re-read books, and I tend not to keep books unless they are truly first class, and I'm confident that I really will read them more than once.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Delicious Library is an excellent OSX application for organizing your books, music, games, and movies. It has support for scanning barcodes (even with a web cam).
I use it, myself, and it's extremely useful.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
I used a CueCat UPC barcode scanner in order to speed up data entry of UPC codes into the Windows app "MediaMan" (free). MediaMan uses Amazon.com as its source for book information (including book covers).
Once all the books were scanned in, I exported the MediaMan catalog to comma separated value format, and parsed it into a custom MySQL database using some custom PERL that I wrote.
Finally, I made it all searchable via the web using simple PHP/MySQL. I would post the link, but the server wouldn't withstand a slashdotting.
I'm willing to part with the PERL script if you need it.
LeMonkey
You are only popular on the Internet.
From the their self-description:
It is intended to manage a small library or documentation center: at 3500 books, you are still considered a pretty small documentation center... But it could ease a lot the management of those books, the friends borowing, etc.
They have a lot of success-story. My librarian wife finded it nice when I showed it to her. Even though she refuse to keep woking at home organizing our books. Damn!
Of course, to really help keeping track of the books, you will need a good physical organisation too. But since Koha can talk Z3950, it may be possible to obtain the classification professionnaly done by big libraries: making Dewey or LC classification is _hard_. Librarian don't usually have master degree for nothing... So I would suggest refraining from going that work yourself ; pick a simple organization, since 3500 books is not that big, when you think about it and compare with _real_ libraries...
Good luck!
And no, I'm not the author! Just a very happy user.
Have a look at Tellico, it's for KDE 3. It totally rocks.
yeah, i know it's probably as inneficient as all get out, but i just made myself a little database with one table with really involved fields like "author," "title" and "location" (actually, location is 4 parts in regards to library, stack, shelf and spot) and then a book id number. then i made another table that had my 3-leveled categories in it. things like "history" and "science" and the like for the top level domain, then sub-domains like "american history" and "everyone else's history" (not a well developed library yet) and finally low level domains like "when we were colonies" and "when we turned colonial". some simple combo boxes and queries makes creating them really easy, (when i select "history" in combo1, then only "american history" and "everyone else's history" is selectable in combo2, but i could also enter "pakastani history" in the combo and when i click "create" it will appear in the list). that's a way confusing and way involved way to describe it, but you'd have to see it to understand. then there's another table that just stores book id numbers and category id numbers. then a few more queries and whatnot that allow me to add categories to any book i want. Then yet another few queries that allow me to sort the books by name, author, and then category. it took me a few days, but it works now. it's really not too bad to work with, i promise. if you've got ms access (sorry, but the only thing everyone here at work can figure out), i'd be somewhat willing to send ya a copy somehow. it's set up to work in a church right now, so there are all these categories like "genesis" and "missions" but you can delete and modify categories at will, so that's no big.
Jester
Warning: This sig may be legally binding in England.
I highly reccomend Library Thing http://www.librarything.com/index.php. It lets you lookup by isbn and effectivley copy catalog. After that it is a pretty straightforward matter to just print out a list and put them in order.
Unless you are truly far away from civilization, check books out from your local public library. They keep thousands of books (and can get almost anything not in the collection) in temperature and humidity controlled conditions with careful organization.
3,500 e-books fit in a remarkably small space.
One of those big long books from the Lord of the Rings trilogy is about 1 MB.
That means you can fit 1,000 books them on a 1GB chip. Four of those little 1GB camera cards could store 4,000 books, and you could fit them all in your wallet! The chips would cost about $400: which isn't so expensive when you factor in the cost of bookshelves, storage space, and the nightmare of moving over a tonne of paper every time you change residences.
Right now, today, almost all publishers have electronic copies of all the books they print. There's no technical factors preventing them from selling them: and perhaps, once they figure out the DRM & marketing, they will.
Perhaps one day, you'll be able to buy an e-book the same way you can buy a paper book. Until then, try Baen Books, Project Gutenburg, or just OCR scan all the books if you've got a lot of time to waste...
Hello, zgrossbart! .
I've been in the same situation as you. Our family has a large personal library as well, with the added difficulty of being in two locations (about 1/3 in my office, and the rest at home). Here's what we've done to tame the literary beast.
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As far as the data format, we started keeping track years ago with a simple database in MS Works. We set up categories for Title, Author, Subject, Copyright, Price, and LoanedTo. The database was very simple, because we didn't want to spend a lot of time being obsessive about bibliography - we just wanted to track which books we had for insurance purposes, and to whom we loaned which book. We've since moved onto the Linux platform, but the flat-file text nature of the database made it very easy to switch.
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As for as the physical organization of the books, we have the SHELVES categorized. Here in my office I have 28 different sections, all clearly labeled by topic. Each book is arranged alphabetically by author in those sections. It takes me about 30 seconds to locate any book in my work library based on a request. Our home library is set up in much the same way (except our shelves aren't labeled there).
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We also have the database set up to track CD's and movies as well, but we've not yet physically organized those resources (we thought we were going to move, and packed up a lot of stuff).
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I think the KEY for us is the physical layout of the shelves. Once you have your library sorted by category/topic, I'm sure you'll be able to find what you're looking for very quickly. Hope that helps!
G.B.Y.L.B.T., PastorEd
Announcer: "Never before in the history of motion pictures has there been a screen presence so commanding ... so powerful ... so deadly ... He's CONAN THE LIBRARIAN!"
... THE DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM?!"
... Tonight, only on U."
Library Patron: "Can you tell me where I could find a book on astronomy?"
Conan: "Don't you know
Announcer: "Conan the Librarian..."
Library Patron: "I'm sorry, these books are a little overdue..."
Conan: "RAR!"
**Conan cuts library patron in half with enormous 2-handed sword**
Announcer: "Conan the Librarian
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Then again, leaving the books in random is a perfectly viable option. There was an online service for keeping track of books that got plugged on Slashdot about 4 years ago. As I recall, you just had to enter the ISBN and location ("third shelf in bedroom"). That would be ideal for this guy, if I could remember the name of the site — and if they're still in business.
First, number all of your books on the spine, starting with 1. Then create a database keeping track of the specifics on each book (number, title, author, topic, publish date, etc). On your bookshelf, just make sure that all of the numbers are in order. When you want a book, lookup the book number in your database, go to the bookshelf and easily find its number.
We use Readerware for our catalog. The nice thing is that they also have a client/server version which is what sold me, as I have a Linux server upstairs that can run the server code. For Readerware, I also maintain my boardgame collection. This is a much larger problem, as it takes up a room with about 22 bookshelves with games on both sides. (about 3000 games) The real trick is that each shelf has an identity---In our case we use bookshelf letter/shelves from the bottom/Left or right side. So N3R is Bookshelf N, 3 shelves up, Right side. Games get a label on the outside with their assigned shelf. (I'd use bookplates on a book collection, with the shelf assignment written on the bookplate. Without this, it is a pain to reshelve books/games.
I used to work as a computer tech in a small public library, and I was there when they decided to convert the whole system from the machine stamped cards to a barcode electronic system. I'll let the other /. posters help you decide what system to use, but I do have a suggestion that may help you out with the data.
In whatever system that you decide to use, I can tell you that if you plan it right you'll be able to import a lot of the up front data about the books without too much effort. For example, there are sites where you can type in the ISBN and pull up records with the title, author, copyright, publisher, category, and maybe a brief synopsis. You can definitely search the archives of various online libraries, and with a script parse it into your database. When my library buys a new book to put into the system, they pull the MARC records from Baker & Taylor. I'm not sure what kind of registration you'd have to do on the site to get access, but they're our primary resource and worth checking out. Good luck!
I face many of the same issues, with some differences:
I judged the barcode scanner solution to be a tad expensive for my needs.
Also, I store more than half of my books in boxes, so they are not out, so I need to know which box they are located in.
here's my lowtech but efficient solution.
Create a spreadsheet, with fields for
Author, Title, genre, pb/hb, notes, read?, box number, purchase date.
Other things like ISBN, UPC are also helpful, but I didn't want to complicate my life.
There are solutions that let you type in ISBN which will link to metadata, but you're not really saving a lot of time or mental energy.
Create it on your desktop (using excel or open office) and download it to your PDA (using PocketExcel). Then whenever you remove a book from a storage box, you can change the box number, so I know where it is. The PDA element is vital; Nobody's going to go to their PC every time they want to take something.
With a spreadsheet you can sort things easily and quickly view things by criteria.
I do keep a web copy.
Yes, I know there are web applications out there to try, but I don't see the need for a server-side solution if it's always in my pocket. (I do ftp the updated spreadsheet to my website, even saving as HTML on occasion.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
LibraryThing lets you catalog your books online and compare your list with other peoples'. It's free for collections of less than 200 books, and is otherwise $10/year or $25 for lifetime registration--
http://www.librarything.com/
I use Apache/Php/Mysql/Opendb in Linux but it would work on XP. The key is the sourceforge project "Opendb" which is a Php application. It was originally for DVDs, but you can create and customize a book type. I am trying to keep all my media in there, but I still have a ways to go with CD's. It still took me a lot of time and patience to put in 1900+ books, but I now don't have a problem keeping it updated. It does have plug-ins to acquire data from amazon on books based on ISBN or title. Some people use barcode, but I didn't - my husband had books which were older than 20 years old. I like using it as a web application, because I can access it anywhere. It is a lending library program so you can give others check out privileges. I use it so my husband's friends will remember they have his books (they sometimes forget).
Freshmeat listings for Tellico and Alexandria. I took a look at both of them a few versions ago and they were too massive for my needs (a few tens of books).
Zarf's Book-Scanning Project overview may be of use.
An interesting book on the subject is called "The Book on the Bookshelf," by Harry Petroski (ISBN: 0375706399). So- one more book to add to the collection. Although largely a historical perspective on how books have gone from being protected documents, chained to desks, to commonly available paperbacks and similar, there is also a section on organization, including some pros and cons. Published in 2000, it does not cover computer databases. A used copy shoud be available on the cheap. I have a similar conundrum with an analagous collection of plants, and am working on using my existing database to deal with those as well- everything is in there, but I need to assign location data. It's already barcoded.
http://www.koha.org/
I'm seriously considering organising my books by colour when we move into our new flat shortly. It's not hard to work out where any book is (and I'm used to having a rough idea of where any book is despite not organising them in any particular way in the past) and it can look fantastic.
The Strand bookstore in NYC has 8 miles of books (I know, I have the T-shirt). Anyways, they categorize meticulously by subject and author. It works great, and it is a vast collection.
The only thing you need after the initial labor of categorizing, is discipline-- to put things back where they belong.
If you want to get fancy, make stickers for the inside front cover saying "Library of
I do the barcode thing for work (bio-samples in -80C freezers). Its not worth the hassle to scan stuff in and out of your system (let alone register it in) unless you absolutely have to do that. For a personal library, it would be a drag, and your wife and kids probably wouldn't cooperate anyway.
If you happen to have a Mac take a look at Bookpedia. Version 3.0 coming soon and looking good. Extremely fast with a large number of books.
You can always donate your books to the local library and they will categorize and label them. That is what old ladies do in Finland (book reading procentage 80%) when they die. Call me a communist, but information must be spread. Why store it in your shelves.
http://www.periapsis.org/tellico/ I used it with my collection of about 1500 books. Now with version 1.03 it will use UPC codes. It can also be used for collections of cd's, dvd's, and other things. I'm happy with it. It works like a charm with my cue cat. For anyone needing to catalog books it is a good reason to investigate Linux.
I use Readerware (www.readerware.com) which works with a barcode scanner (it looks your book/DVD details up on Amazon) and has been around a long time. It's available for a variety of operating systems. I only got halfway through my own book collectin before collapsing in exhaustion :)
You could always take a high-resolution digital picture of your collection and apply OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to the book bindings. Now that you have the names and locations of all the books, you are free to catalog them however you want on your computer. When you want a book, you simply hop onto your computer and choose one, then your computer will show you your picture again with the location of your book highlighted. You can then grab the book off the shelf! I'm not sure how well it would work, but it would mean you wouldn't have to waste time sorting all the books, plus it seems like a pretty cool piece of software to develop.
If we assume for a moment that these books are on average 1 inch thick (which seems a little low), we're talking about almost 300 ft of books. Assume a floor-to-ceiling bookcase with
8 shelves, and you're still talking about a 37 ft wide wall completely covered in books.
If you have that much space, just start sorting by author, title, or however you want. That barcode scanner certainly isn't going to do the sorting for you.
If you don't have enough space to store these books in an easily accessible way, I suggest you just donate all of them to the local library, and get a library card.
you will still have to put them in some sort of order on the shelf.
So attach RFID tags with LEDs and little piezo speakers to the spine of every book as you record them in the computer. Then when you look up the book on the computer, it sends a signal, and the book's tag responds by blinking and beeping. The sound will lead you to the general location in the library and the flashing to the specific book. Maybe not for a public collection, but perfect for a personal one. Just a small adjustible clamp to put over the top spine corner.
Then not only do you not have to sort them on the shelf, you also don't need to shift your collection over all the shelves to make room for new books; just keep them on the shelf in rough acquisition order. (Sorting by book dimensions is the most practical method for a large collection anyway, making the most economical use of shelf space.)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Sadly, I have no room large enough to line with shelves for housing a proper library, so things have to be split up into various rooms. In this situation, trying to go with a standard organizing system is impossible. There's also the case that certain types of books belong in certain rooms. Geek books in the computer office, Art books (practical and non) in the art studio, crappy paperbacks in the guest room, reference and language in a central area, Special Collections of finely bound and first editions behind glass, etc. And there's no way I'm going to start damaging my books with stickers to tag them (though I do tag the DVDs). Yes, I'm one of those freaks who actually loves books, the printed word, over digital data and television. I actually wrap the dust jackets on most of my hardcovers. Books are far more valuable to me than any piece of computer hardware could ever be, and they're so much more permanent.
My solution (at the time, several years ago, I was playing with simple, idiotic scripting and it was the middle of winter) was to create a Filemaker database, with everything cross-referenced and all info. on a volume easily available, and then to organize books in sections. In each section, there's a loose organization, usually something alphabetical, but that's not strictly necessary. If I know that all the anatomy books are in a piece of shelf in a certain room, or that symbology, demon possession and other religious claptrap has its own little area near my drawing table, that's close enough. All geek books go in their own shelf, organized by nature of the beast (languages, software, hardware, web technologies, etc.), and that shelf is in a practical place for the subject. In the database is a simple pull down location menu, easy to change on the fly. Yes, it takes time to input everything at first. But once that's done, it's a simple matter to add new books, or remove the 3-month old but still amazingly out of date geek book (only intelligent use of digital books I've ever run into).
Yes, the Filemaker thing is primitive. But remember, this was done when most /.ers were still in diapers (wait, they probably still are...). Cheap bar code readers weren't yet available, SQL and the like were still hidden in the world of übergeekness, and not allowed to the public for intelligent consumption, etc., etc. Nowadays, there are more options, but no great solution.
You could go with one of the professional library cataloging packages (check out BrodArt Library Supplies, great company, and they sell to regular people, too). But these aren't cheap, and are often overkill. I've personally tried Delicious Library, and looked into other more current options, but they all seem to have a central flaw that hasn't yet been satisfactorily solved. They're really meant for new items. Things _must_ have a bar code, really, or an ISBN. Things _must_ be in the Amazon or some similar system (and most of the books in the world are not). The ISBN system wasn;t created until 1966, and wasn't adopted as a standard until 1970. So finding any volumes from before this time in Amazon is nigh impossible, and likely non-existenet. If you're trying to go along a shelf scanning items for your database with a portable scanner (and I ran into this even with items that had barcodes, and should have been in databases, such as new PS2 games, or recently released crappy paperbacks), for later xfer to a database, you don't know which things have been missed on your scanning journey. What's the point of scanning things remotely if you have to carry the computer up to the books, or the books to the computer just to see what has or hasn't b
I'm currently working on a new piece of software, that will use open source software and APIs, be freely downloadable and support a whole bunch of features, including (always open to suggestions):
- Add, edit, manage, create etc. book collections, libraries, lists, favourites
- Write reviews, make and eMail recommendations to friends
- Manage lending books to friends and family i.e. manage your own lending library
- view your collections in multple formats i.e. lists, book views/shelves (similar to Delicious monster), details
- Access your collections remotely over the web
- Access your collections via your PDA or mobile phone - use barcode scanners to update lists whilst out in the stores (I use a Treo 650 with bar code reader)
- Export to ANY data format, currently supported are all major MS Office formats, XML, HTML, XHTML, RSS, ATOM, PDF and DB formats will follow shortly.
I'm still in the early stages of development, but am actively looking for beta-testers. I hope to get a web site up and running very soon, but if anyone is interested in signing up, then please send an email to marc@heyhoe.com.
Marc.
When I set up my home library a few years ago, I used Thokbook from
http://thokbook.sourceforge.net/ - it had a simple installation and a
fast command-line interface. I finished all forty of my shelves in one
day, and that included some unpacking time.
Sort them by color.
Does anyone know why we have to learn the Dewey Decimal system for public school libraries/public libraries, and then when you got to college, you have to learn LoC? That has always annoyed me. It seems to me that you should only have to learn one system.
I use LibraryThing alot. I have indexed almost all of the books in my apartment through it. Give it a try, the subscriptions are pretty cheap and you can have up to 100 books I think for free to try it out. When adding books you can search a ton of different libraries, including Amazon.com or the localized versions. When searching Amazon it will pull in all the information including the book cover picture.
You can import text files if you have your library in some format already, or export the data once you catalog all your books.
It also has a social tagging aspect, and the ability to share your library or keep it private.
I am in no way affiliated with LibraryThing, just a fan.
If you have a logical organization to your bookshelves, though, you can always call for help. "Honey, do we already have Debbie Does Dallas on the immature-comedy shelf in the east wing?"
Buy a scanner.
>you're so fucking self centered and selfish
it is definitly no more self centered to throw away than to keep when not in use. true, passing it along (which throwing in the trash did acomplish for this person) may open that book up to a new audience (or just cost the author a % of a new sale.)
> you can't see all the embodied energy that went into the production and transportation of that book
transportation:
so if your not throwing the book away, then you have to re-create the transportation to another user, nothing lost
production:
if the book is still in print (all of Piers Anthony would likely qualify), then 98% of the production is not lost, only the re-printing part, which will be re-created.
For a couple months now I've been using http://librarything.com/, which is evolving into an incredibly powerful, flexible cataloging tool. It's not desktop based, and that turns out to be a blessing, because I can access it anywhere -- including from the public library -- to see if I own a particular edition of a particular book, or what other Thingamabrarians have said about it.
the social/community aspect of LibraryThing is addictive, in that you can find people with similar tastes and go through their catalogs. I've discovered a lot of new authors and books this way, and struck up some interesting discussions.
But for me personally, the biggest attraction of LibraryThing is the fact that Tim takes the library science end of things very seriously. Amazon is one -- but not the only and certainly not the best -- source of cataloging information. I can add a book to my library by querying one of more than thirty libraries in the U.S. and overseas -- including the Library of Congress. I can also query Amazon (US, England, Germany, wherever), but adding through the Library of Congress provides much more complete and reliable data, including the MARC record. I've got 2,500 books in my LibraryThing library, and I've experimented a lot with the system. The ability to target high quality cataloging data is not matched by any other program I've looked at.
The bottom line: a cataloging system that is dependent on Amazon alone is one that is going to be full of errors.
Finally, there is a good community of people really interested in the various social, technical and computing aspects of LibraryThing, and new features are often added as a result of input we provide to Tim and his coworkers.
Really, I don't know why anybody would bother with any other program.
Some other people mentioned Delicious Library, but neglected to mention the handiness of its compatibility. You can use an iSight or other webcam instead of a real barcode scanner, and there's a widget for your hidden holster Dashboard so you can find your favorite books quickly.
Applesauce!
http://www.emilda.org/ is a similar setup with a smoother user interface. It is not as easy as Koha to install because you have to find perl scripts and install them. Koha has a script to do that.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
If you can't remember if you already bought a book or not, you probably haven't read it, or even started it. Which means you're buying more books than you have the time to read. There are far more books than can be read in anyone's lifetime; a valuable skill is the ability to select the scope of the material you will spend your precious time reading.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned LibraryThing yet.
As others have already mentioned, no software is going to actually organize your books for you - that takes actual moving of physical books around in the real world. But LibraryThing is the hottest thing going right now for keeping track of your books. It has all the latest Web 2.0 buzzwords.
As for MySQL, you're thinking on entirely the wrong level of abstraction. Talking about MySQL is like saying "So, I want to build an airplane. I'm thinking of using aluminum."
I use readerware, and it is pretty nice. As a java appliation, it runs fine on linux. It's not as pretty as some of the native Windows and MacOS cataloging applications, but it does the job, and its website scrapers are very good.
The backing database for Readerware is HSQLDB (formerly Hypersonic SQL), which is open source, so that should meet the OPs desire for an open format backend. I've queried it a few times for reports that the readerware front-end can't handle.
you can try http://lib.rario.us/
i know i'm probably not going to be seen this late in the slashdot comment game... however, i'm working on a web application specifically for managing your real world media... it's not very old, a month or so, along, but if you're familiar with folksonomy for organizing, i think you'll see that it does afford you more flexibility.
i haven't added on bar-code support yet, but it is in the works.
for a minute there, i lost myself...
I wish I could afford that problem.
But if you can afford that, you can afford Delicious Library and a Mac mini to run it on.
Selling them, perhaps ?
:)
I first got rid of 25% of my library this way. Old text books, books that I'll never, never open again. I'm thinking of keeping only 2+ inch reference books and a few books related to very personal subjects.
It's skinking every week.
It takes courage, a deep breath, and there you go
Dear Slashdot, I have a large pile of DVDs in a disorganized mess in front of my tv. How can I organize them? (Do I get a FPP now?)
Yvan Eht Nioj!
Just use digital images of the books in their shelves. If you have books hidden behind other books or in boxes, it's faster to browse the images. You generally have an idea where the book might be and can check the relevant images. ...maybe I should try that myself...
My wife and I have about 2,500+ books, plus several hundred back issues of magazines, as well as assorted notebooks, binders, and so on. I've got them all out on a total of 21 bookcases here in our basement, organized by general and specific topics. For example, all my computer-related books are in three (very large) bookcases, with specific shelves for software engineering, network security, AI, specific/related programming languages, and so on. No index cards, no database, no Dewey decimal system. I don't even alphabetize, though for some topics (e.g., history), I will use a rough chronological order.
..bruce..
To pack more books into a given bookcase, I do group some books by size; that is, a given bookcase will often have one shelf set up for oversized books and another set up for paperbacks. But the topics on those shelves correlate with the bookcase as a whole. I also tend to group bookcases by topic; for example, I use five bookcases to hold all our fiction; each case has a general theme (classic, modern lit, mystery/thriller, SF, fantasy), but I feel free to let genres (most notably SF) spill over to adjacent bookshelves due to lack of space.
I can pretty much find any book I'm looking for within a minute and often within seconds: go to the appropriate bookcase(s), go to the appropriate shelve(s), and scan across. Since the topical organization is of my own choosing, I can easily remember and maintain it. I even have a couple of shelves set aside for "books I've recently acquired and plan to read in the near future", so I don't just file them and then lose track of them.
There are occasional glitches, but they tend to be self-correcting. For example, this morning I was looking for an old textbook, _Improving Your Reasoning_ by Alex Michalos. I looked on the philosophy shelf--not there--and on the shelves containing books on English composition, writing, etc.--not there, either. I finally found it stashed on a half-full shelf a few bookcases over (placed there, I think, due to lack of free space on the English comp shelves). After using it, I refiled it in the philosophy shelf, since that was the first place I looked for it (and there was room for it there). I will likewise do occasional reorganization of selected shelves or entire bookcases when new approaches seem to be more obvious or make more sense.
It's all very simple, easy, effective, and low maintenance. However, it does require the appropriate wall space and bookcases. YMMV.
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
If you buy english and dutch translations of books like I do (I'm not too picky, and don't mind a translation), it can happpen that you buy a book that you happen to have in the other language.
:-)), so it's possible to be unsure if I've read a book or story.
Then there are different editions with different titles (That's something I don't understand; why change the title to something completely different, instead of just translating it).
Then there are omnibuses and collected works... not to mention I tend to forget the stories over time (which makes re-reading a book fun
I'm very happy with my Palm and MobileDB when browsing the second-hand bookstore.
As for organising the physical books: two bookcases with SciFi and fantasy, one for detectives and stuff, one for computer books and technical stuff.
Per category sorted on author name of course.
wow. a lot of people are kinda jerks on this topic, and i can't figure out why.
I'll suggest that you may want to figure out exactly what you want to do with your data, first. Using a barcode scanner isn't going to organize the books on the shelves, but it'll let you organize a list of your books. That's great if you want to keep a searchable catalogue and shareable index, but it also means that if you want a book you need to go to your computer first, every single time you want a book.
My library is smaller, but I still like to be able to browse shelves that are in a sensible order when I want non-specific reading material.
A lot of folks have suggested sorting your books like a bookstore, and I agree. Fiction versus non-fiction, then go from there by genre or subject. If you want more efficient, then go by author. If you want pretty, sort by book size. Now, don't forget to leave blank shelf space around each section! Even if it's only a quarter or half a shelf, leave yourself room to expand.
Category stickers on the shelves are good, or you can use dividers between the books themselves, like sheets of thick cardstock that stand out and are labelled. Then categorize the shelves themselves. Put a piece of paper or a colored strip on it that's plainly visible. Either mark the sections on it, or make yourself a master key that's very easily visible, like on a medium-sized poster on the wall.
Now, whew, right. You've sorted everything pretty hardcore by now. OK. Still want an inventory? Grab your barcode scanner and go forth. What to do with the data? I'd probably end up importing it to MySQL and writing a simple custom web interface in PHP for this part. Scan the whole lot, and sort it out in a db however you please. Make a cheapo web frontend with a multi-function search (by title, author, category/genre etc) and you're golden.
you could also add in a 'shelf' marker to the db, allowing you to see what is where in your physical library. as in, "show me everything on the blue shelf" or "authors that start with 'A' on green shelf".
I'd probably skip that bit myself, though.
That's it, really. Course, I haven't done the db stuff for my own books. I've got quite a few (three 7' tall and 3' wide cases, two 3' tall by 2.5' wide cases; all packed nearly full) books myself, and I just sort them on the shelves as mentioned above. I'm not really interested in a digital solution. I've thought about it, and realized that a digital inventory isn't really that helpful until I've got at least enough to match a medium to large used bookstore. I figure that if I can look at all my shelves in one sweeping glance, even if I've got to turn in a circle, it's just added baggage and extra maintenance I don't feel like doing.
It is not worth the troubles of installing (and maintaining!) a database server, IMHO.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
A lot of people has been in the same situation before you, and as a result they came up with a very effective yet lowtech method you seem to have missed. Please check out this page for an introduction to the concept by Rolando Merino.
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
I hope this helps.
Does the author have a problem with the Dewey decimal system? Hello?
If you already have 3500 books, you're probably a collector, not a "tosser" at heart. You need to consider how your system will accommodate future expansion to possibly tens of thousands of books. In no particular order:
Here are a couple specific strategies that have helped me and my wife:
I have seen Koha (www.koha.org) implimented at a small library at the South Pacific Forum Fisheries Agency, which is being used as a reference site for the implementation of it in other organisations throughout the South Pacific. All you need is the software, barcode printer and scanner. You scan or punch in the ISBN for the book and Koha looks it up on the Library of Congress database (I think) and adds the data to your Koha database, it then prints out a barcode sticker. I think it also does all the Dewey classification for you (on the printed sticker) so your books are automatically organised. Contact the librarian through the FFA website www.ffa.int.
For me the thing I needed to remember was my wishlist--books I had read about and was looking for. Keep in mind this was before the internets made book searching so boring.
For this purpose I had a small notebook with the titles noted, or in some cases particular editions I was looking for of books I already owned.
This system provides a clue to the whole problem. It was easy to remember books I had because I read them and if I kept them it was because they were memorable. If I read them and didn't like them, the crappy reading experience was equally memorable.
What couldn't be remembered, for me at least, were the wish list books I hadn't read yet--books for which I had no memories except a title.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
This solution costs about $1000 and 20 minutes per book and takes up a lot less space in my house.
;-) etc.
1. Buy a good, fast duplex sheet fed scanner like the Fujitsu SnapScan FI-5110-EOX ($300). This will scan a book to a PDF file in about 15 minutes. I use a new razor knife to cut the binding away about 10--20 pages per swipe.
2. Buy a copy of ABBYY Fine Reader OCR ($300) and OCR the book.
3. Save as PDF with page images on top and OCR underneath in a hidden layer. Keep the resolution at 300 dpi with JPEG quality 70. At this resolution, you can print nearly perfect pages, read it really easily on the screen, and it takes about 0.5MB per page.
4. You have 3500 books, they probably average about 330 pages each, so that's 3500 x 330 x 0.5MB = 577GB. Add a couple of 300GB disks to your PC ($400) and dump the whole pile into "My Documents/books".
5. Let Google Desktop Search go. Within a few hours, you can do a full-text search across all your books. Authors, titles, chapter headings, etc. It works pretty well. I've used this to find stuff from my old college physics and chemistry texts.
I've gone almost completely paperless at home this way. It also works pretty well for keeping track of junk like bank statements, utility bills, patent filings, love letters
The books (less their bindings) get stored in large cardboard boxes out in the garden shed. Pretty compact. I fit about 70--90 books per box. Your 3500 books would fit in ~50 boxes, or 2x5 stacks of 5. Incidentally, I haven't counted, but that's about how many I have, but I have to admit, I haven't scanned them all yet.
Chris
Ok, but what about this: Most of the books I buy are reference material. 90% of the book is a duplicate of other stuff I have in other books, but I REALLY WANT that extra 10%, so no, I'm not going to read that book, ever. I've already read most of it.
Of course this doesn't address a newer release of a previous book, same title, but more, newer info. Dang!
"My wife and I ... solution for ... barcode scanner ... the best way ... ... easy to maintain ... going forward ... open format ... ... open to other suggestions ... organize ..."
;-)
solution that
MySQL
Check your cards. Surely someone got a bingo out of this?
Unless you are in a remote area, are serious book collectors, and/or are serving as an informal library, why in the world do you want to waste your time and house space warehousing 3,500 books? I personally agonize over selling my books but when I do I hardly ever need them again.
Expiration date method of culling unused books works for me.
This works well as it
- takes minimal effort (you only mark books you are using, not all 3500 books)
- gives you a visceral idea of what books you actually need and use.
1. mark your calendar 3 months from now
2. for every book you find yourself actually needing or reading, use it and put a slip in it that "extends" the expiration date another 3 months.
3. after three months, sell all the books that do not have their expiration date extended
Rinse lather and repeat every three months to maintain a sane flow of books into your house and back out again.
voila! cataloging problem removed (or at least severely reduced). Now you can use that old book space and money from the sales for that indoor pool or trampoline you've always wanted. Or paint a mural that *looks* like a whole buch of expensive books.
Sort all your books by height. Then you just have to remember about how tall it was to find it again. This is much better than the old "sort them by color", cause what if you're color blind?
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
Each book has a Barcode on it right? Does it not identify the book in some way? Maybe the ISBN number is in the barcode?
:)
My problem is that it takes FOREVER to data input my 6k+ book collection. Getting a barcode reader that auto translates it into some database format would ROCK. I could just physically organize the books and scan them as I do so.
My father got rid of over 9 thousand books and gave them to a library. I think they are still trying to catalog all of them
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
What you need, and all you need, is Tellico.
Try Readerware. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Palm. There is also a server version. It can also be used to organize CDs and DVDs as well. It has barcode reader support including the Cue Cat. It interfaces with Amazon.com, etc. to pull artwork and info. We've been running it for a while with a Mac as a server, along with PC and Palm clients. The interface is definitely not as nice as Delicious Library or IntelliScanner, but Delicious is Mac only, and IntelliScanner uses their own barcode reader. IntelliScanner can also keep track of your wine collection, track groceries, etc., but is very expensive.
My wife is a private music teacher and she uses the built-in lending system to track which students borrowed what classical CDs, music books, etc.
http://www.readerware.com/
http://www.intelliscanner.com/
Another commercial solution is Readerware (google it). It's java based so it's cross-platform.
CRAWFORD, TEXAS -- A tragic fire on Sunday destroyed the personal library of President George W. Bush. Both of his books have been lost.
A presidential spokesman said the president was devastated, as he had not finished coloring the second one.
Haida Manga
I read a nice little bit of sci-fi on salon wherein one of the sub-plots was a home organization system with semi-transluscent boxes and rfid tags on every thing... then when you needed to find an item you went to the console, queried for the item by any of the index columns and once the item was selected it was located by its tag and the box was lit up, or the item was lit up and it glowed through the box - I'm not sure. It was just fiction anyway.
The current state of the tags doesn't seem to support this; the small enough tags (price tags) need to be within about 6-12" of the reciever and the tags with the range (toll tags) are too big and cumbersome to glue to a book. But I haven't looked at the specs in a while and things are always changing.
I suppose that a smart bunny could build a reciever into the shelf in such a way thatit was convienent to scan the book when it was stored on the shelf and transmit the id to the database, then it would just be a matter of lighting up the shelf when book was identified as a search target. I guess just having the database spit out the shelf location at which the book was stored would be acceptable without the lighting up part, but turning on lights is pitching to my wheel house when it comes to hardware hacking.
But then there is the matter of discipline, if you remove a book from the shelf with the intent of replacing it as soon as you check this one reference and then the kettle boils, the database will continue to show the book as being on the shelf and the damn thing will be on the floor in front of the throne. You'll need one of those fancy Japaneese robots to roam around your house and discipline you when you fail to follow procedure.
1) Put away the barcode scanner.
2) Shelve the books alphabetically by author.
3) Go through the books and enter title, author, and anything that particularly interests you into a text file.
4) Find what you want with any text editor's "find" feature or grep.
...it isn't my congress. :-)
Seriously though, LoC doesn't work too well if you live in the rest of the world.
Why not just alphebetize your collection by author and title?
Help us build a better map!
when you restack a book, you can scan the UPC and then the database can tell you where it was stacked last, so you can put it back in the same place if you want to.
I tend to remember the story and the cover art, not the title and/or author. The dust jacket description almost never represents the main story points I remember, so I have bought different copies of the same book with different dust jackets. Sad, I know, but true.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I like to use Books for OSX found at http://books.aetherial.net/. It's open-source and tends to work out pretty nicely. It isn't as feature complete as Delicious Library or Booxter, but it tends to do the job for me.
If you don't mind paying a bit, and it's only books that you want to read, Booxter is a good choice. A lot less than the Delicious Library.
So, I was wondering how 3500 books fit in a house. . . approx 1 in per book . . . approx 144 books per smallish bookcase . . . approx 2-3 rooms to hold those bookcases (assuming the rooms have some other furniture) . . . not too bad
Wait a minute! How many books are in my house? . . . backfiguring . . . 2100! WTF, over? How did that happen?
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
What I've done (for 5000 plus titles) is to put together a Filemaker database,
and forget about barcodes, just type in author and name... it helps that I'm an
adequate typist. Ideally, there would be full card-catalog info, but I've only entered one
other bit of info, the size (my paperback shelves and my hardback/trade paperback
shelves are distinct, 'cuz you get better packing that way). For future consideration,
it might be good to catalog short-story entities within the volumes...
A friend does something similar and logs the prices (in case of insurance claim).
It's working fine, and won't break until my Macintosh hardware will no longer
run the old version 2.1 of Filemaker.
To bookhunt, I've exported a tab-delimited file of the author and name fields, and
use split (yeah, the old BSD utility) to make small files from it, which go onto
an iPod in the Extras/Notes subdirectory. iPod notes browsing works with short
files only. It's good enough to slow my rate of duplicate acquisition, but something
on a PDA where you could jump to the middle (by text entry on author or title) would
save time. I'm considering that, though I usually have my iPod and only occasionally
carry the PDA.
For reference, consider that author/title info for 5000 books still is under 1 MB of data,
so the big-data problems are unlikely to occur. Even an old low-capacity PDA will work,
and any iPod except the shuffle.
You're right. Fsck the market system, let's bring back the barter system that served us so well in the past!
Deliberately choosing to do a "right thing" that would reduce profit can put a CEO in jail.
Sounds like a huge pile of FUD. I'd love to see a case of "The people vs. CEO of XYZ Corp." where s/he was sentenced to jail time for having a reduced profit. Name the court case and not some news clip bullshit, please.
We need to eliminate the concept of corporations having the same rights as people.
They don't. They have similar. Explain to me why corporations shouldn't have the right to, say, due process or property ownership.
We need to eliminate the idea that those leading corporations are not liable for the actions that are required by their mandates AND de facto requirements that result from them.
They are, to a degree. But I agree that their liability is too limited and corporations have a resonsibility to the people and should be brought under a court of the people when violating this responsibiltiy.
The problem with the system is that not enough checks are placed to keep corporations honest. Unfortunately, this ties directly to their ability to "donate" money to political candidates/parties/politicians. This should be completely outlawed, and any loopholes found and closed. Still, this is a far, far better system than others. I sure as hell wouldn't want to try the barter system.
Anyways, the "culture of corruption" refered to in your post and the grandparent is not the fault of the US government. You may just as well blame a child for being born. The people who elect these officials are to blame (democrat and republican alike). Unfortunately, most people are too retarded to actually bother thinking and instead vote from their heart/feelings/ideaologies/religions/etc. The system failed us because we failed the system.
look at an f-ing library. Books organised alphabetically by author name, or, in case you have a lot of different types of book, by category and then by author name. See, you don't NEED technology for everything.
-- No Sig is a Good Sig
I think I've been stuck in programmer world too long, when I read this I immediately thought of it as a search problem that could be solved with hashing...
In fact, given my knowledge, I would make a simple program that would gather data from the books using your barcode scanner. Each barcode would provide a unique id that could then go into a database. Along with each ID you could type in the title of the book and associate it with the ID. Maybe there's even an online database of finding book info given the ISBN. Have some extra time and a scanner? Great, scan in the cover and backside and maybe the first page of contents and archive it along with the record in the database as an image or binary data. Better yet, get some OCR software and convert the scanned images to text for searching and add that as well. (Or maybe you don't even have to scan it yourself, just go to amazon and copy infringe their images?)
Now when you organize the books, you don't! But to make it easier to find things, I would at least put books into boxes/bins/shelves and label each shelf. So say you have shelves A, B, C and boxes D, E, F. Along with your book ID, title, image scans, you could also add another field in the database called 'location' where you would put something like shelf A or box D. Now anytime you want to look up a book, you search the database and the database will tell you where the book is located. Likewise you could search the database for "shelf B" and get a result of all the books that should be there. Took out a book and forgot where it goes? No problem, search the database for the book and the database will tell you the location it goes--exactly the same as finding a book.
As long as each shelf/box/bin is fairly small of say 10 to 20 books, searching each one shouldn't be too hard if you don't worry about organizing by shelf (takes O(m) time to find the book where m is the shelf size) whereas if you did organize within each shelf directly by sorting the books one way or another, your search time can be reduced to log(m) to find a book BUT your time to place the book back into the shelf is a little worse than just dumping it back into the bin. The database would actually be able to tell you the exact location of where to place the book in the bin because the database can sort items by title and such--but you'd still have to count books to find the exact location.
So you got it working, and you go look up "MySQL for dummies" or something like that. You see it is in shelf G and proceed to take it out and use it. Here's where everything kinda "breaks" in the sense that you have to update something or stick to a rule to place books back where they belong. If you didn't place "MySQL for dummies" back in shelf G, the system starts to contain bad or inconsistent data. This would be true for any library system. But at least now, you have a master mapping of where the books should go. This is better especially if your barcode scanner works. Figuring out how to place books back in the right place without a direct mapping system is painful; I worked at a library for a week and I felt like I was doing something close sequential search for everybook in the cart.
The main benefit to this method is that you don't have to spend the time to sort and manually organize (sort) your books how you want. Instead you spend exactly O(n) time (where n is the number of books you have) populating your database and have the computer do the searching for you which is much faster than you manually searching yourself.
Well I know I didn't answer the question, but maybe you or someone else can now go start your own open source library software? Or maybe someone's already done exactly this? (I guess that's kinda what his question was.)
but Sturgeon's law applies to all possible subsets of everything. After removing the 90% crap, you will quickly discover that 90% of what you have left is now crap.
pornking
http://www.bookcrossing.com/
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
Here's a great idea. Look over your collection of books, gather all the ones that you haven't read in 10 years, are outdated (from the 1950s), can be replaced by the interent (encyclopidias and dictionaries) and just plain stupid and ones that you would never read and RECYCLE THEM!!!!
WTF are you doing with 3500 books in this day and age? You're like the jerk off that still gets paper statements. You jerko, it's the 21st century, get a computer and discover the internet already.
Tellico from http://www.periapsis.org/tellico/ is the best option that I found. Using it I started to catalog all my books [allowes you to fetch all the data from amazon/library of congress/etc] based on ISBN numbers, titles/etc. You can easily add/remove/edit fields for your collection, thus expanding based on the premade templates, which include everything from music, movies, books to coins.
The only thing I'd love more about it would be a windows version that could use the same databases.
--- d'oh
My local library easly has thousands more books then you and its not a bit hard to find anything. Just start cataloging your books like the pros do. Has worked for generations.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
i used book collector (http://www.collectorz.com/book/) But it doesnt work that good through wine....cant get it to query online libraries by isbn....i've got just over 3k books too...and i BADLY want to have them in a db...otherwise i'll buy dupes by mistake.
The typical best practice solution here goes as follows:
Note that this process can be completed in hours, days or years. The books don't care. You can perform your software-based inventory as you go along or when you are all done. Whether you use Excel, MySQL or Notepad is pretty irrelevant for the small volume you describe.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
It seems to me I've seen organizations with even larger collections use a similar system.
Am I missing the point? Is this harder than it seems to be? 3500 books is only about 15 standard size (3 foot by 7 foot) bookshelves (assuming no paperbacks).
Support SETI@home
You are right in some ways: there are http://www.snopes.com/katrina/charity/library.asp institutions that really would appreciate secondhand books: hospitals, Salvation Army, schools, homes for the elderly. Better contact them first before showing up with several cubic meters of Louis Lamour pockets though :)
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Library of Congress is better--the call number for each book is unique. With Dewey, you have a subject heading, and all the books within that subject are basically unordered, as far as the system goes. If you can't find the author of a book, then, what do you go by? Just the title?
Still, your personal system depends largely on how you usually remember your books. Do you usually say 'I had a green book about so high and maybe four or five hundred pages long'? If so, you might find it most intuitive to have your books physically ordered by appearance and use a database to browse by subject or author. Or do you usually do research on a particular subject? Then going by the Library of Congress system would probably be best. Or if you binge on particular authors, you might prefer categorizing authors by field and then arranging books by author.
Disclaimer: I am a librarian, and I work in a university library using LoC call numbers.
My wife and I are bibliophiles too with a familyroom full of IKEA shelves. We group by subject, like any library but without the specificness of Dewey. Feminist lit, humor, antique reference, current reference, children's lit, novels/classics, and so forth.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
I haven't used it but it looks like an amazing interface that uses your barcode scanner to get details about the item from sites online. The UI looks fantastic as well!!
http://www.delicious-monster.com/
I have a lot of anthologies. I wanted my database to be able to answer the question "Didn't I read a story called Such-and-such...what book is it in?" I hate having to thumb through a hundred anthologies to find a single short story. So I made a database where I can enter all the short stories in each anthology, including the name and author(s) of each story.
Overkill, no?
If you see something interesting, you can just hold off on the purchase for--OH MY GOD, one day--and check at home first. While your at it, maybe grab a couple of the 3000 books you can't remember and barely ever use and sell them back to the store or donate them to a library.
Ah well. There are people in the world wondering where the next bowl of rice will come from and we're here jawing about wtf to do with a coolection of 3000 books the cost of which could have fed some starving person for a year or two.
Bleck.
As readers of "High Fidelity" know, that must be the best ordering system (it seems save to assume that what works for music should work for books, too).
I believe that by reading your books you could solve this pproblem.
(2,3-Benzopyrrole)
Both are like dictators, and both wouldn't have been able to be like this without their henchman. Or do you really think all that is Bushes work alone?
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
For those who live in cities, maybe that's an option. When I did, the library never had enough copies of the book I wanted.
Now I live over 200 kms from the nearest library.
And gee, the bookstore is a similar distance away.
When I get there, it's important to know what I've got, and what I'm looking for. The next trip into town might be 3 months away.
-- You can't give it, you can't even buy it, and you just don't get it!
Go to a public libray. Pick one that uses the Library of Congres system and look what they do then copy thier system. This will save you much effort because all your books will already have card catalog information that you can use and the system will be understandable to anyone who has been to school. But the biggest and best reason is so you can make use of other people's work. There are widely used standards for keeping library information -- don't reinvent the wheel. One good place to find out more is at the library of congress web site. Here is an example page http://www.loc.gov/marc/faq.html
How about setting up a card catalog for the books? Get numbered labels and number them from 1 to 3,500 and stick them on the spine of each book. Then take 10,500 index cards (3 for each book), and write the title, author, subject, and number (that you assign) of each book on it. You can also include any other relevant info or comments on the cards. Sort one set by title, one by subject, and one by author.
You can also set up an electronic equivalent of such a catalog, but since it takes a lot of work to organize that many books, make sure you keep good backups.
Then maybe you could just train your memory. I too have several thousand books, and have no troubles remembering which books I've already got.
Maybe it's just a matter of having my shelves organised in such a way that I can easily maintain a mental map of it.
This is a fairly new site, but I can vouch for it because my friend is one of the developers who works on it. It's going to be great. http://www.socialogue.com/
Dewey, dewd.
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
I have this vision of you, your wife, and a barcode scanner. ... I'll get my coat.
Hell, I read books to get a break from computers. I think if I had that many books I'd donate most of them to the local library. I know I don't have time to reread 3,500 books - there's millions more out there I haven't read yet!
The fact that you can go to the library and get a book doesn't make home book collections worthless. Sometimes, it's really nice to read for an hour, without having to worry about due dates or dealing with librarians. My parents always had a lot of books in their house, and I ended up reading a lot of them at various times. I think that, on the whole, it was much more helpful than living next to a library would have been.
Some people have been mentioning e-books. Well, it's still a lot more comfortable to read a physical book than to stare at a screen. Until the technology catches up, books are still the best.
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
Your best bet would be using the Library of Congress system (i.e. LOC). The LOC search page URL is posted below.
o cal&PAGE=First
http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=l
I performed a fully manual update, first searching by ISBN then inserting the full record and price into a StarOffice calc sheet. This was quite tiresome. You should do BETTER by ordering LOC on a CD. This way you might perhaps write a quickie program to scan the ISBN and retrieve LOC information. Does anyone know of an pre existing program that also works like this? PLEASE LET US KNOW if you can point to a pre existing program (thanks).
I sorted my 570 book library by LOC number.
I did not label any books. My future plan is to scan a book's ISBN to locate info from a MySQL db.
A half dozen books were not found in LOC. Here LOC may list the first edition but not the second edition. Obviously you can make a good educated guess this way.
LOC's exist for VERY OLD books. For example 1908 "The Telegraph Instructor"
LOC order results in an interesting sort order, for example, where Tuft's "Visual Display of Quantative Information" is in QA276 Statistics-Graphics Methods while Tuft's "Visual Explanations" is in P93 Visual Communication. Also fascinating are the adjacent books after organizing them in LOC number.
Any librarians out there, please feel free to add to this!
Good luck,
Jim
Delicious Library works great for this. It stores all of its data in an XML file, which is open enough for me.
If you are looking for a software based solution what about http://koha.org/. Koha is a free opensource Library systemwhich runs on Linux OS X and even windows. but it may pay to take bits from some of the other sugestions about organising and even culling your collection.
You want a good system for organizing books? Go to your favorite used-book store, and see how they do it. Part of the reason I like my favorite store is because it's well-organized.
You need to SORT them into groups of related books to make them findable. Try to do "binary sorts": split fiction from non-fiction, then the predominant ficiton genre from the rest of the fiction ... until you have the books grouped the way you want. You will have to sort any group by author and title to get started: you probably have duplicates in there. Set the duplicates aside.
Are the 3500 books distributed across many genres, or is it 3000 romance novels and 500 cookbooks? It does make a difference. Fiction goes well sorted by genre, then alphabetically by author, just like a library. If you know that SF is in the living room and murder mysteries in the rear bedroom it's easy enough to find what you need.
One method I have seen used for a predominantly non-fiction collection, seen in a used bookstore in Phoenix, is "geographical". The owner has all of the non-fiction that relates to a certain geographical area shelved together. It's been a while since I was in that store, but I believe he starts with the histories, then biographies of the citizens (chronologically), and then through natural history, etc. Within an area, he starts with the overviews and multi-topic books, then down to the books about a country or city or species. Non-fiction that is shelved separately: Medicine, Psychology, Chemistry, etc.
For tracking the books in a computer, you need a database that can retrieve the books by YOUR search terms. If it doesn't allow you to find "all the books about China with maps", and it's something you will need to retrieve, it's a bad database. If it doesn't let you add genres, it's a bad database! I had an ACCESS database that let me find "all the books about 18th century China" by careful use of 6 keyword fields. (I should port that thing to MySQL!)
Email me if you want to discuss the project - anything to help out a bibliophile.
The vast majority of the books I own have their Dewey number printed on the copyright page right along with date of publication and edition.
Those that don't, I can assign a Dewey number based on the subject matter. Hmm, math...500. Physics, 530. Here's a fairly nice breakdown you can use for just the main numbers.
Now your books are in order. Want to be able to look them up? Someone already suggested the card catalog--a tried and true old system. It works. Or, if you insist on using a computer system, how about one of the available free and/or open source solutions? There are many more available online if you search.
Jim
Open Source Library software here:
http://www.open-ils.org/
or
http://www.koha.org/
Delicious looks yummy. However does this do library numbering systems like Dewey or Library of Congress?
Also wish code would be ported to other operating systeme, perhaps Solaris or Linux. Any plans you know of?
Thanks,
Jim Burke
I use readerware - http://www.readerware.com/ - for my thousands of books - I used a bar code scanner to scan them in. Readerware lets you put in the location of the books - to make the process easier I scanned a bookcase at a time, setting an easy-to-remember name for each bookcase as the default location for that set of books. The process took a few hours, but I've never had to waste time searching for a book since then.
This is SO educational! -- Kintaro Oe
I've wanted for a while now to catalog a library for a local genealological society, but didn't know how to go about it, and the answers posted to your questions have saved me a boatload of time. I'll give readerware, collectorz.com, and intelliscanner all a try.
I should note that this one seems informative. It *does* take time to set up: I'd say about 2 months in real time, using your spare hours, to get it started, and then as much time as it takes you to do it.
Best of all, Koha works right now.
That said, the user base is friendly and helpful; the system is straightforward. You can access it from the web if you have a solid IP address.
However, I don't know that a computer program is actually the solution to your problem. Instead, let me suggest something different: devote a room or a corner to library shelves, and order your books according to (fiction - his, fiction hers) and then by topic. Don't forget large shelves. Then once it is all organized, use little stickers on the binding to tell you where each goes. More than anything, *sell stuff in a yard sale, or throw stuff out.* If you're not going to use it, get rid of it. In reality, you should have 1.5 times as much stuff that you use today, as you have that you use this week; and 1.5 times as much stuff that you use this week as you use this month. Then another 1.5 or so for this year, within 2 years, within 3 years, within 4, and within 5. If you're not going to use it in five years and it isn't of a very personal nature, get rid of it. Why? Because it is cheaper to buy it new, later when you need it, than it is to buy new everything you need every day, and can't find.
Later, if you want you can computerize your library. That's the small and least organizing part.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
According to Better Homes and Gardens:
s _2_79/ai_69964503
A typical family accumulates books, magazines, videos, and memorabilia faster than a speeding minivan. But you don't have to know the Dewey decimal system to get these materials in order. Borrow ideas from the following cataloged collections. The goods are stowed with efficiency and decoration in mind.
Family photos, journals, scrapbooks, and mementos are stashed neatly behind attractive neutral facades. Corral items of various sizes in corrugated cardboard and cream or beige decorative paper covers, giving the assortment a cohesive look. Choose vessels with similar colors, and stay consistent even if it means covering some containers yourself. A soft chair and small desk nearby makes sorting and labeling a welcome chore.
Bring your cookbooks and recipe cards with you from one food prep area to another on a handy rolling cart. A tall bottom shelf holds any size tome, and a short shelf puts oft-used recipe cards within reach. Wrought-iron braces on the sides and back of the shelves keep items from falling off. Look for a cart with a top surface at convenient waist height to make reading recipes easy. Then add a portable cookbook holder. Keep your recipe cards together and stored in good-looking galvanized tins and lunch boxes. Tucked on the upper shelf, they're a shiny counterpoint to the darkly stained wicker.
Give your bookshelves a makeover to conceal any ratty-cover paperbacks, anti bring beautiful hardcover books front and center. Start by pulling all the books off the shelves and grouping them by color and cover type. Tuck the paperbacks into square baskets and stack some books on the shelves. Then, fill in with hardcover books, sorted by color. Too many dark books will create a black hole on your shelves, so break up the pattern with lighter ones.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1041/i
The "Embedded Space" column in this month's Doctor Dobb's Journal details how to build your own ISBN scanner for books(not available online unfortunately). The ISBN is a more universal identifier for books and the author tells you how he's using it to organize his own library (including a DB he downloads to his PDA so he can tell what he has while shopping).
None of this takes the place of good old-fashioned manual organization of bookshelves, BUT while doing that it would only be a small extra step to wave a scanner over your ISBN bar codes to enter your book into your database. So by the time you're done re-arranging your shelves you'll have built your DB suitable for searching, sorting and download to PDA.
i won't comment on the software appropriate for your needs, because many people already have. however, i would like to elaborate on the usefulness of a meaningful physical ordering. yes, databases can answer arbitrary queries and find you subsets that will never appear together on the shelf: a one-dimensional list of books, what the shelf holds, can exhibit at most one top-level order. what you have probably noticed in practice if not theory is that a single order, say by the surname of the author/editor, does in fact suffice for many library accesses. i would by no means suggest that it supplants a database, but to avoid having a top-level ordering is to sacrifice the possibility of finding a book without referring to the computer, as you have found. i highly recommend that you implement a simple ordering scheme for the physical artifacts. many well-known sort algorithms are documented in knuth and elsewhere!
cheers,
aaron.
Delicious won't get ported to another OS as it relies upon a lot of functionality in OS X.
OTOH if your head is an empty vessel unable to hold any content or you are merely buying the book because it has the correct colorful spine, most which cheerfully decorate would-be programmers' shelves without being cracked open ever then you indeed have a problem. The solution: sell your OO book collection and change careers.
Some friends with lots of books have a strange solution. Their living room, and a few more rooms, were entirely lined with books. All their books were categorized by size, and then by color. I thought this was completely bizarre, but I asked why. (It's not like they had great decorating taste that would demand uniform bookshelves.)
They said, when you've read a book, you usually remember about how big it is, and usually what color it is too. And when I think about it, when I go looking for a book, I look at the area where I think it is, for a book that is the right size and color. So maybe they're onto something.
So they might be right. I haven't tried it, but there is a very different, low-tech (unfortunately) possibility.
Classifying 3500 neatly into cabinets shelves and rooms is going to be a nightmare or wasted time since all the information you need to search will be in the computer already.
Why not adapt another inventory management technique that simply records the shelf number along with the book? You would just have to number and code each area of storage with a barcode, scan that barcode before going through all the books in that location to register them. When you take out a book or return it, you'll have to scan the area code as well. Nice thing is that you wouldn't have to return it to the same area and getting more books is easier to manage as you just add them where you have room for them.
If you were sorting your collection -which is probably the size of a small library- you would need to spend so much time re-arranging the shelves that it would require you to become a part-time librarian. Additionally, sorting the shelves means that you need to be very disciplined about where you put them back, otherwise they may be lost forever if filed in the wrong place.
Just use that simple location code based inventory technique and you'll spend less time sorting books and more time reading them.
Try Alexandria, a free (as in speech) book managing application. Screenshot here.
The gf and I did this recently with around a thousand books. We sorted by author and re-shelved as we went. She also manually typed the details of every book into a spreadsheet, which I thought a little excessive, but she likes accumulating data and keeping busy. She also likes buying books, and I haven't yet managed to assemble sufficient bookcases to shelve her entire collection. There are some flatpacks in storage which should theoretically take care of the situation, but I've noticed that every time she gets more shelving, it gets filled a week later. I'm therefore trying to eke out the last couple of bookcases until I can find her a bigger house :/
You're just wrong on all of your points here.
First of all, the OP was asking for advice on cataloging his library, not for you to critique his lifestyle. For all you know, he may already be contributing your entire salary to famine relief, and doesn't have your phenomenal memory to remember each and every book instantly.
Second, he may be a collector of genres that his local library and bookstores don't collect (or only do so on a limited basis), and many of his books may be ones that are not easily found at either a library or bookstore. Furthermore, donating them to a library doesn't mean that it will go on the library's shelves, donated books often end up at a "friends of the library" sale, and ones that don't end up in another private collection are recycled, so donating to a library doesn't mean that he'd ever get a chance to reread them should he desire to later.
In order to stay on topic, I have tried Readerware, and while I thought it was OK, I never quite brought myself to go from using it on a trial basis to buying the product. I liked the download from internet features. I thought it was slow at internet lookups, but that's probably so that it wouldn't overload the servers it was querying. I was doing batch loads with a Cue Cat scanner, and I'm not sure if I ever tried a one-at-a-time load to see if it has a background query. If you're using it to verify that you aren't accidentally buying something you already have (or even trying to track down the rest of the books in a series), and you have a PDA, make sure that the PDA client can handle 3000 entry database. Many PDA DBs choke on that size DBs.
What if you buy a bunch of books (let's say five) by an author you're interested in, but not all of them? And what if, along with that batch of five, you bought another five or six by other authors?
Later, you're in a bookstore, browsing, and you see books by that author. Remember, you just ordered ten or eleven books, some of which perhaps you haven't had a chance to read yet. You know you'd want other books by that author, but you don't want multiple copies of the same book (usually).
It's happened to me. I've missed out on buying books that I want (but don't want to pay top shipping dollar for) because of it.
If you see something interesting, you can just hold off on the purchase for--[...] one day--and check at home first.
Not always an option for us expats.
There are people in the world wondering where the next bowl of rice will come from and we're here jawing about wtf to do with a coolection of 3000 books the cost of which could have fed some starving person for a year or two.
Not really relevant, but most people who are starving today are in trouble because they live under oppressive and corrupt regimes.
You're a suburbanite.
If the title is idiomatic, it probably shouldn't be translated literally. Otherwise, I agree with you.
You're a suburbanite.
>I believe this has already been taken care of... It's called the Dewey Decimal System.
Oh, the joys of being at the top and all those desperate modders just itching to dump their mod points before they're gone. Back to topic, no-one's going to use dewey decimal outside of an institutional setting, that's just dumb.
How about categorizing by subject and author? Put all the books on math & physics on one shelf, then alphabetize that shelf by author. Take all the romance novels and put them in the guest bedroom, and do the guests a favor and put all the ones with explicit sex scenes in one place for easy browsing.
Jon
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
that's really too bad. I'm a pc user and it sounds like a fantastic program.
Hi,
/., what a bunch ! I'm not sure how many books I have, maybe 900 or so, but I also have similar problems to you with remembering what books I have. I've been thinking of cataloguing my books on my laptop so I can take it to bookshops and check what I have.
This is a general reply to those who've also replied and are getting down on your for not being able to remember what books you have, and are telling you perhaps you should read the ones you have then. Only on
Here's something to think about for all those people who think you should know what books you have just because you're read them - what happens if you've got a book out of the library and read it, but now want to remember if you own it or not before buying it ? This happened to me yesterday. I have about 20 Terry Pratchett books. I was looking at one of his older ones which I read several times when I was at school, over 13 years ago. I couldn't for the life of me remember if I had it already.
I have similar problems with Tintin and Asterix books. I've been reading those for over 20 years, mostly from libraries, and have picked up a few of my own. However now that I want to buy more of them for myself, I have a lot of trouble remembering which ones I already have. I know them all so well there's no point trying to look at one to see if I'd read it or not - I've already read every one, multiple times.
Another problem I have is with manga which have multiple books in a series, especially when I haven't been able to buy them all in order. Do I have "Lupin III" number 6 ? Hmm, I'm pretty sure I have 5 and 7 at least...
I collect books, so a lot of the time I'm also looking out for older or different editions, or ones in better condition than those I already have. Duplicates are also often useful to trade with others too, as long as you can remember which are worth having duplicates of.
I often read 2 or 3 fiction books in a week. I also have a lot of non-fiction, not all of which I have read cover to cover but which I have bought because there was something interesting in it. A lot of it is reference as well, bought specifically because it has stuff which I know I'm going to need and will want to be able to look up.
I'm getting to a similar point with movies too. I have about 600 on DVD and VHS. Most DVDs I buy on sale so I don't really have a shopping list and need to pick from what's on offer. I almost always buy movies I've already seen, so that doesn't help. I'm replacing some of my favourite movies I have on VHS ( many of which are taped off TV, so they aren't the greatest quality ) with DVDs when I get the chance, but I can't always remember when I've done that, especially when I happen to chance across something on sale. With DVDs I find it's also much hard to remember which DVDs in a series ( generally anime in my case ) you already have. It's much more difficult than with books, because often all you have to go on are episode names, which I personally don't pay much attention to when I'm watching. Sometimes you get a little synopsis, but it isn't always useful.
Regards,
Jo Meder
Hi,there I am from Guangzhou in China, I have a good solution to your problem. Please contact me by email: ugee@tom.com Best regards, Yue Ji
I would recommend Library Thing. I've only 300 books and I'm using it. With LibrayThing you will have social newtworking features like know people who has the same books as you have. See the reviews and discover related titles.
Take a look. For more than 200 books you have to pay $10 annual ou $25 lifetime. For less than 200 it's free. And you don't have to manage any home system.
Canoramix
For my library of something around 2000 books (ruined by Katrina) I used a little something called 'the alphabet'. It's kind of an old technology, you might not have heard of it...
More precisely: alphabetize fiction by author, then sort by loose groupings of sequels/chronological order (as you please). Some non-fiction may be sorted as fiction to make a statement. Sort reference books by subject; I arranged them mostly by weight, keeping the heavy volumes near the bottom to help shelf stability.
Leave space on shelves to create room for expansion. Place tchotchkes and knick-knacks in these gaps if you please.
Note that this can result in lots of 'wasted space' if you shelve hardbacks with paperbacks, as I do. I looked at it as 'breathing room' instead, and enjoyed the fact that I never had trouble removing books from the shelves as I might have if they were shelved for maximal space efficiency. I also enjoyed the lack of paranoia about them tipping over from being seriously overloaded.
Be willing for The Library to be a major design element of your home. If you're not - start selling those suckers off. Or wait for your local disaster, as I did.
It's <i>your</i> library, a record of what made <i>your</i> mind. Arrange it in a way that suits your needs. If this is not strict Dewey Decimal/Library of Congress, spend a little time just looking vacantly into space through your shelves now and then to reinforce your mental map of the things.
PS. Bookcases suck. They cost a lot for the amount of shelf space they give you and really limit how you can place the shelves.
egypt urnash minimal art.
We decided that there was just no perfect way to organize books, so my wife, tired of the ugliness and inefficiency of our shelves, decided to break books up into size ranges, and assign each range a letter code. Then, each unique new book gets a serial#, and they're ordered by that. Multiple copies of the exact same book get the same code, and if there are multiple books in a series, she uses a decimal point and a seq#, e.g. "F311.4". Doesn't do much to help you find a book if you don't know what you want, but it allows you to have your shelves sized just big enough, and they look great. She also has a series of color bands on the books that tell what age ranges the book is appropriate for.
:-)
Once she introduced me to it and showed me her spreadsheet that she was tracking them in, I didn't change anything, but added to it:
Each physical book is assigned a separate serial# (doesn't matter if it's a duplicate) and barcoded. THAT serial# is the key in the database; all of the other info from my wife's categorizations is in other fields, along with other info about the book (scanned covers coming eventually). I then have other tables to track patrons, checkouts, ratings, etc.
I wrote (er, started) a custom application several years ago to make the whole thing nice and friendly, but I got distracted by other more pressing projects, so for the past few years I've been entering data directly in the [MS Access] tables, figuring that one day I'll either finish the program, or be satisfied (raw or modified) with something already out there, and convert my data.
Sorry, no solutions, but maybe it'll give you some more ideas.
Hi,
;-).
I've tried Delicious Library, and didn't find it to be much use. It has nifty features and looks pretty for sure, but it might not be very useful at all if you don't live in the US. I live in New Zealand. When trying out DL I tried entering barcode numbers for CDs and DVDs but more often than not it couldn't find them in any online source it knew about. I guess that's because of the region of the world I live in, and the different publishers etc. we have. I now have a webcam so I will have to try it with some of my books, but I'm guessing there'll be similar problems there, unless I enter the ISBN manually. I also found the cover art was hit or miss, it isn't really important but it's one of the features of DL. As an example, I have quite a few Terry Pratchett books and I really like the covers they have here ( and in the UK I think ). For some reason the US editions have different covers, most of which aren't nearly as nice. I've sometimes thought about buying them from the US because they can be cheaper, but have always got them here just because I like the covers better. It might seem trivial, but DL puts so much emphasis on being a visual tool it makes a difference if you can't actually get covers which look like the books you have. There is a similar problem with CDs and DVDs, but it isn't so bad. That isn't a fault of DL really, it can only work with the information it has available.
Of course over at least a third of my books predate barcodes, so DL isn't much use there either. A lot of them don't have ISBN numbers either. At that point DL doesn't seem to have many advantages over other solutions, except for looking prettier. At least it will try to look up other details and cover art based on minimal information, so that can be handy.
DL is a nifty app but it's far from perfect. If you live in the US ( maybe parts of Europe, I don't know ) and mainly have collections which actually have barcodes, along with a reader/webcam then it may be great. If you live elsewhere and/or have a diverse library of differing ages and countries of origin, you are likely to better off with some other solution. I suspect for large collections the visual aspects of DL aren't going to be that handy. Once I'd entered about 10 DVDs it started to seem a bit gimmicky, especially when a bunch didn't have cover art, so I had a shelf of some DVDs with cover art ( a few of which actually had the correct cover ) and some which were just plain covers. Not really especially appealing to look at face on. I'm not sure the bookcase representation would be that useful for me either. With a catalogue I'm generally going to be looking for a specific book, so I'll just search for the name. I can't imagine browsing the bookshelves in DL, after all I already have the real bookshelves to browse. It's cool to show people though
Regards,
Jo Meder
I bought a license for it recently. I used the built in iSight camera on my imac Core Duo to scan a bunch of books. It worked well, not perfect.
It's a nice, but basic program. It doen't do anything particularly special, but it does the basic well enough. And it looks neat.
My memory recalls that the Dewey Decimal system costs money.
A simple approach would be to physically sort by ISBN and and just enter ISBN, title, author, and physical location in your favorite database/spreadsheet software. You may find it lowers the risk or impact of bad data. It is not too complex. The work you do to collect the information may be useful in subsequent efforts.
Dewey Decimal Dude!
A database will never help you find a book if they're arranged in random order.
i havent tried it, but imediaman says that it's like 'delicious library' (that everybody mentioned before) for windows.
Excellent post. I collect manga/comic books but I also read JUMP or download the latest scans from the net. There is usually a 2 months difference between a comic is published in JUMP and the time it is published in the book form - more if you are looking for a translated version. It is quite common that I do not remember which volume I am up to when I am at the shops.
I buy lots of DVD as well because I like to collect them and lend them to friends. However I am a cheap ass so I will wait to pick them up when they are on sale, so I can never be sure if I have bought a copy of a particualr title or not.
I agree, it can't be that hard with merely 3,500 books. I have 2,500 books and get upset whenever anything is moved an inch too much. I have total control over more than 99% of my books, without a software catalog. The remainder is attributed to children, wife, and other pets. In fact a series of shelves work very much like a series of directories would do... Wholly cheeses... Hey wait, "How would you recommend me to arrange my card file system for my 20,000+ subdirectoreries on my rig?"
Delicious looks yummy. However does this do library numbering systems like Dewey or Library of Congress?
No, but Booxter does - it will gather both Dewey and Library of Congress numbers.
I use Book Database X. I runs on OS X as well as Windoz. It supports UPC Barcode Scanners and Internet Lookup Using Amazon.com. You can find more info regarding it at http://www.valencio.com/. Hope this helps.
My wife and I have about 3,500 books. We can't find anything. All the books are in random order.
/. editors. You don't need software. You don't need to program anything. You need a method for organizing your books. It's called the dewey decimal system, and it's worked for hundreds of years. They taught it to *me* when I was in 3rd grade, and it's used everywhere that they have books.
Okay, um, you're talking about real, paper books, right? Not e-books scattered about on your harddrive? And you've um, never been to a brick-and-mortar bookstore, or a public or school library, right?
Because the answer to your question seems so stupendously obvious, that a) I boggle at the question even being asked, and b) I boggle that it passed the
This story is a cry for help. The school system has failed the original poster, the original poster has spent his entire existence in a cave with 27 computers and a T1 connection, and I think he's lying about having a wife too.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Its called a shelf....look into it.
support for Windows, Linux, Mac, Palm, has versions for books, CDs, DVDs......
http://www.readerware.com/
In alphabetical order?
I'll Find You Peer, If It's The Last Thing I Do!!!!
I'm going to throw my $0.02 in for LibraryThing. They use more than just Amazon.com to pull the information from, including many national and university libraries (though with accessible records, that is). So if you're cataloging non-US books it's of great use. Plus, you can input your own covers (which helps me since so many of my books are pretty old and have been reprinted two zillion times already).
No matter what software you decide to go with, you're going to have to physically sort your books anyway. Why not get started sorting your books *now*, then see what you *really* need for keeping track of specific titles once you have a better sense of what you have? You can get the ball rolling by deciding what broad categories of books will go in each room of your home, then as you start shuttling books from room to room you'll be able to see which areas need more fine-tuning and which can just be slapped up on the shelves. You may find that once your books are organized on your shelves, you don't really need to do any additional catalogging.
How you organize your books really depends on what you have and how you use your books. Just to give you some ideas, here's what works for my husband and me (I have NO CLUE how many books we actually own, but they are slowly taking over our home...).
Technical, academic, and other career-related books go in the home office. Programming books are sorted by language; the academic books are sorted into math, physics, and neuroscience, then arranged by topic and level (general interest/undergrad/graduate/journals). There are a couple shelves of career guides, busienss topics, and other career-type stuff, but not enough to need a carefully managed organization. That pretty much fills up that room.
The rest of the books are divided into fiction and non-fiction. Fiction is divided into sci-fi/fantasy/horror and mainstream/literary; everything by the same author is kept together, and the authors are arranged roughly chronologically. There's some degree of sorting by nationality and literary movement if we happen to have a lot of books in a particular category (Russian authors are all together, as are Modernists). My parents keep their short storie anthologies in the spare bedroom, which is handy for when we're visiting. I have a spot in the bedroom to stash fiction books I haven't read yet so that (a) when I finish one book, I have a nice lineup of new titles to choose from, and (b) it helps discourage me from buying books (too much) faster than I can read them.
Non-fiction is sorted by topic, and books needed for specific purposes go where they will be most convenient. Cookbooks go in the kitchen; hobby-related books go near the hobby supplies; art books (and oversized coffee table-type books on other subjects) get an easy-access shelf in the living room. Self-help and health books go in the bedroom (I find them to be good books-to-read-yourself-to-sleep-by, YMMV). Other subjects--psychology, history, philosophy, etc--are grouped together on whatever shelf space is available after that; if we need them, we know where to start looking.
This wouldn't cut it for a public library, but it makes sense to us (the only people it *needs* make sense to). Don't feel like you have to use the Dewey Decimal System or whatever if it doesn't suit *your* needs.
Readerware. My wife uses it for our library. It runs on window$, linux and OSX. There's also a palm port just for searching so when she goes to the bigger book stores she knows which book in a series she still needs. Scans the barcodes and gets the info from several different sites. I'd post a link to her website, but I like my .mac account and want to keep it! Anyway the program is at www.readerware.com .
Just in case your solution doesn't have barcoding, there's a free font that does code 39 ("3 out of 9"). To code "bn22" to put it in between "* as delimiter, so print *bn22* in that font will give you a functional barcode.
BTW, a bit overkill, but you could use KOHA (www.koha.org) as your system.
Insert
Check out Book oragnizer: http://www.bookorganizer.com/ I've used the movie version of ths software- lets you scan barcodes and track lent-out books. Plus its free
How will organizing the shelves help when you're in the middle of a bookstore and are wondering if you already own a certain book? I can't remember all several thousand books I own - having a digital reference on my PDA is invaluable.
No, it is not invaluable. It is five or ten bucks, depending on what book you are looking at. If you can't remember having read (or owning) a book, by all means, buy it and read it again. It will be as good as new! Literally!
Do these people know how to use a computer???
Directions for How to Use a Bar Code Scanner:
Tips/Warnings
If your memory is not capable of storing that information, it doesn't make any difference if you buy that book twice.
Both are good. Each has tagging. Here's something cool you can do with Stuffopolis: http://herestomwiththeweather.blogspot.com/2006/03 /google-maps-meets-stuffopolis.html
Charlie
photograph your bookshelves. type out all your titles and authors. import photos into word processor. place ascii over pixels. wa-la. search what your are looking for and beep boo boo beep boo beep, stop!
I HAVE 300000 SONGS ON MY IPOD! AM I NOT COOOOOOL!?
How many books can you read at the same time? One.
How many books you really need at any given time? 5? 10? 20? Certainly not 3500.
I stick to the advice of one of the greatest wrtiers of all times. When Gabriel Garcia Marquez was asked what he does with books after reading him, he said he just bins them.
That is it. You need to consult something? Go to the library.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I use the book collector software. It's easy to use, scans library of congress, amazon, barnes & noble, and a bunch of other book sites to download cover art, descriptions, title author etc. from the scanned in ISBN number.
Try LibraryThing.com Delicious Monster ties you to one computer, whereas LibraryThing.com is a Web 2.0 service that has most of the features of Delicious Monster and MUCH more. I can access LibraryThing.com anywhere I have an Internet connection, bookstore, cafe, coffee shop, etc. Additionally, LibraryThing.com allows me to easily catalog out-of-print books, something I cannot do with Delicious Monster. LibraryThing.com cost $25 for Life, or $10/year. I've tried both, and LibraryThing.com rocks!!!!
IF you have a library of that size, you tend towards duplication. And when you frequently end up acquiring unnecessary duplicates, you begin to want to be able to quickly and efficiently determine whether a book you wish to buy already exists on your shelves.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Why do so many geeks think the answer to any data organization problem is poorly coupled metadata?
It's like the people who think buying Microsoft Money will make their checkbook balance, when the real problem is they haven't made time each month to balance their checkbook.
Incidentally, I have at least that many books and I never have any trouble finding anything - and I never have to update a database - because I use exactly the system you've described.
sort your books online
http://www.parchayi.net/account.php
That said, however, a program (such as Book Bag) can have one very important use in a library that large- it can keep you from buying duplicates. In our house, we buy not only new, but also used, books (my wife has a history jones) quite often. Once you get past a certain number of books, it's difficult when encountering a volume to remember whether or not you already own it. For that purpose, it is nice to have a portable list of what you have, to avoid aquiring it again.
So, my recommendation is to inventory the books one time, keep the inventory updated as you acquire things, use a tool which lets you move that to something portable, and use that system to manage your acquisition of other books - but don't use it for managing the location of the items at all.
I awoke one morning, many years ago, while spending a lazy summer at my grandparents' house, to discover they had somehow acquired HBO service. This came as a shock to my grandparents -- particularly my grandfather, the cheapest man in the world -- who had, perhaps, the most barebones cable package known to man. They had less than "basic" cable, just local channels, just because they had issues getting the local news over an antenna because of their house's location on some hilly terrain.
My grandfather, being the sort who actually reads -- from start to finish -- the manual and all accompanying literature for everything he buys, might have been the only person in the continental United States at that time proficient in programming his old VCR (it actually showed the right time). He also had the good fortune of being geographically located near a newly-opened Big Lots store (which, for those of you who don't know, is some sort of extreme discount retailer that sells a lot of irregular items and overstocked stuff nobody needs).
This perfect storm of a pay channel being piped into the house of an incredibly cheap man with the free time of a retiree, allowing him to make daily trips looking for sub-dollar VHS tapes to purchase by the hundreds, conspired to create the greatest library of stolen cable the world has ever seen.
Thousands of tapes. How many thousands? I don't know for sure. I don't visit a whole lot because my relatives are crazy, but last time I asked he was sitting on ~20,000. Some large portion of that is recorded figure skating (his major vice) and old Bob Ross painting shows, but the majority of it is just about every single movie that has been on HBO since the late '80's.
He labels each new tape with a number. This number corresponds to the position on his elaborate system of shelves (which consumes two bedrooms, a sitting room, a closet, a hallway, and most of the den), and everything is basically laid out in order so higher numbers are in the back of the house. When he records a show (he never wastes tape, so each tape holds multiple shows), he labels an index card with the show title and the number of the tape on which it appears, then files that card in alphabetical order in a huge box with all the rest.
On the rare occasions that I visit nowadays, I have no problem finding anything he has. Though he has made the switch to DVD, aside from dividing the remaining space on his current shelf by the width of the standard VHS tape and skipping that many numbers in his index system to accomodate future recordings, then starting a new shelf (he builds them) of a different size for his budding DVD collection; he hasn't ever had any problems with losing tapes or things getting out of order.
This might not seem like a very good system for organizing books, and it isn't. Thus, you might not see the point of mentioning it in response to this query. Here it is:
You and your wife are apparently smart enough to read and collect 3,500 books. My grandfather only reads TV Guide, Popular Mechanics, woodworking magazines, and The Bible. You have access to barcode scanners, databases, and computing power. He has access to a box, a pen, and a stack of index cards. It took him about five minutes fifteen years ago to devise a system that has allowed him to organize a media library at least five times larger and considerably more complex than yours.
Why do you fucking have to Ask Slashdot to figure this out?!
Get shelf. Put books on shelf in some order. Remember what order you put books on shelf (or write it down). You're welcome.
Game... blouses.
Theres lots of posts saying that you should place books in alphabetical order by author. I would disagree with this. For fiction books I group all the books by an author together and any individual books by other authors next to others within the same genre. The order of the Authors is fairly random in my main library but i do have several other bookcases around the house which contain the books by my favourite authors which i am likely to read regularly* Non-fiction gets sorted by subject and sub-subject, (e.g. web is seperated into css, html and php which leads onto mysql etc ...).
.... are you insane? I reread books i have bought, its one nice thing about them not having any DRM .... I can reread them when i want in time spans over years without having to worry about how to access them. Some books actual improve the more times you read them as you pick up nuances which you may not have noticed the first time as you didn't know as much about the characters then.
This means that I can off the top of my head locate any book to within 1 or 2 6 shelf bookcases which means it takes about 30 secs to find. I am cataloging, when i have time, using OpenDB but that is really so i can remember all of the authors i like and which books of theirs i have so i (a) don't buy duplicates and (b) know what names to look for.
t
* for those people who are advocating reading books once and then getting rid of them or getting rid of books you havent read in the last 3 months
I'm surprised I don't see tellico
http://www.periapsis.org/tellico/
you can enter isbn and it pulls summary, title, etc from Amazon (including picture).
You can then enter where it is located, who borrowed it, etc. Works for books, CDs, etc.
There is a Universal Life Value Check it
Platform: Windows, Mac, Linux -- it doesn't matter, though it helps to have a current browser. Cost: Portability: Access from anywhere you can get on the Internet (Erm, not sure about mobile devices). Share-ablility: Friends can access your book collection too if you wish. Usability: A total joy to use. I have cataloged with several systems, and I marvel at how elegantly intuitive the interface is. Type or scan an ISBN and one-click later (usually) the book is in your catalog, along with its cover, Dewey number, LoC number, all bibliographic info, a ratings system and a place for your reviews and personal subject tags (yes, color if you wish). I get a kick out of seeing my collection as a "virtual bookshelf." Community: See who else shares the books in your collection. Read other user's reviews. Add a LibraryThing widget to your blog. I can't compare it with Delicious Library because I don't have a Mac, but I can't imagine switching if I did. --A delirious customer