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?"

Comments

Closed Source but reliable

[dada21]

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.

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 /. 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.

Re:Closed Source but reliable

[peragrin]

Closed source but for The Apple platform

http://www.delicious-monster.com/

It does everything for you. It works with either a scanner or you cna manually enter numbers.

The big solution though is physical sorting of the books. You have to keep them in place and return them to that place, being as anal as your old high school librarian about where the books/dvd's/etc are returned to.

Delicious Library

[jnd3]

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!

Re:Delicious Library

[phillymjs]

Another vote for Delicious Library here.

As for locations, I just made shelves in DL that represent my different bookcases in different rooms in my house, and dragged the appropriate books into each. I'm eagerly awaiting a version of DL that supports 'smart shelves' so I can just use the location info in each book's entry and have those shelves dynamically update.

~Philly

oss4lib

[croddy]

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.

Re:Three answers

[jmilne]

My wife's a librarian, and she would laugh at the idea of using LoC numbers for a collection this small. Dewey's far simpler to figure out mentally for a collection that isn't the size of your local state university's. Heck, for a collection this size, you could go with the standard used book store layout. Just use general catagories and label the shelves so you know what they are. History (maybe break down into Ancient, European, American, etc. if you have a lot of history books), Religion, Science, Math, Art, etc. Fiction could be seperated into genres like Mystery, Fantasy, and Romance, or just organized alphabetically. The beauty is, you probably already know where these books should be catagorized, and you could probably do it all in the span of a few hours. Trying to do anything else, including assigning Dewey call numbers, is going to take a lot more time and effort for not much more benefit.

have you tried Library Thing?

[Glog]

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

Re:The Dewey Decimal System

[RevDobbs]

So, did you purchase your Dewey Decimal licence, or do we have to send the Library Police after you?

Hint: the Dewey Decimal System is not free to use...

bibliophile

[Noksagt]

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)

Re:The Dewey Decimal System

[trepan]

Are you maybe thinking of the Library Hotel which got into trouble with OCLC, who owns the trademark / copyright to the Dewey Decimal System?

As far as I can tell the only cost you might run into in trying to categorize with the Dewey Decimal system is if you want to purchase one of OCLC's classification indexes.

But maybe you're thinking of a different instance in which OCLC required payment for use of the classification system for a small private collection. If that's the case, I'd be genuinely interested to hear more about it.

DL. Any other library solution is 10 years behind.

[Qbertino]

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.

Re:BookCrossing

[I'm the Slime]

On the Macintosh there is a program called Delicious Library that lets you use your iSight web cam to read in the bar codes. It then looks up the product at Amazon and stores it in your "library." You could scan in all your books (and movies and CD's) and sort them by Author or my Title to see which you like best. Then file them accordingly. It gets the book cover off the web too and gives you a virtual book shelf. The software also lets you check-out the book and track that activity. http://www.delicious-monster.com/ This program pretty much rules.

Delicious Library

[Vandil X]

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.

Consider expansion

[ColoradoAuthor]

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:

• Will your system be so much work to implement that you eventually give up on it?
• Will any data you collect migrate to whatever bibliographic/catalogging software you might decide to use in 10, 20, 40 years?
• How will you handle overflow, when there's a bookcase in front of each wall?
• Do you need to protect your library from silverfish or other book-destroying pests?
• Is your house sturdy enough to support all that weight?

Here are a couple specific strategies that have helped me and my wife:

• We organize books by rough subject headings. We subdivide once a category gets too big to find what we need.
• We catalog the books we have read using Endnote (www.endnote.com). We only record the books we've read, to avoid the overwhelming task of dealing with our whole library at once. We use Endnote because it can import info from the Library of Congress (among other places) and because it can export the database in literally thousands of formats, so "the software that comes next" is a non-issue.
• Overflow goes into boxes. Since we're usually in a hurry when this boxing happens, a good solution has been to take a digital photo of what's in each box; everything isn't catalogged, but it's way quicker to glance through a bunch of pictures than to unstack and open boxes. We invest in super-heavy-duty bankers boxes (available from many online office supply stores)--not the flimsy ones in stock at your typical neighborhood office store.
• We keep our eyes open for good homes for books we no longer need. I'd rather ship a box of books to, say, a school in a third-world country than to give 'em to the local Friends of the Library, where book dealers will cherry-pick the best ones, then send the rest to either a book sale or a landfill.