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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
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.
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...
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
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
LibraryThing costs money if you are cataloguing a collection of any meaningful size. There are better options, such as Alexandria under *nix, that do the same gratis.
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.
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.
Not sure how this will go over if your library is already in the thousands, but there's one tip I want to share with people who are just getting their libraries started and don't buy more than a few dozen books a year:
Dispense with this tedious alphabetizing stuff, which will force you to open up space between existing books whenever you muy something new. Just set up some broad categories -- say, one bookcase or shelf per category -- and then add your books to the end of the shelf, as you acquire them. They will then be arranged in what is *for you* chronological order.
When you're done with a book, either return it to its original position, or put it at the front of the shelf. (But stick with one or the other of these systems.)
You're arranging the books so that *you* can find them again after already having read them at least once, right? I can often remember *when* I read a book, but not who wrote it. I also have many books which don't have an identifiable "author" (they were written by several people, or are collections of old photocopies custom-made). If you have books in multiple languages, you have to start worrying about how you "alphabetize" other alphabets.
Dump all that and go chronological!
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 build my shelves 8 inches deep (Yes, build. All the shelves you buy these days are extra deep... Otherwise known as extra-space wasting) so that hard cover and reference books just reach the front of the shelves, and all the shelves are adjustable. If you space your holes right, you can have shelves that are perfect for either the typical hardcover, or the typical paperback. If you want to combine both on a shelf, what we typically do is stand up the ones that are shelf height and lie the others on their side. If most of the books are tall, the short ones are on their side, and the other way around... Truely large books are uncommon (let's face it. most geeks have a collection of fiction in paperback, trade paperback/comic book, and hardback sizes, and the O'Reilly sized books, but not much else.), and go elsewhere, like on top of the shelves.
If you use #2 pine, and you don't mind using the wall as a structural component (side-to-side stabalizing only, so you don't need the back) you can build attractive, if not plain looking set of shelves in about an hour if you take the time to build a shelf hole jig. As a bonus they only cost around $20.
I manage my books and CD's with Readerware and a portable scanner with a USB interface. Very cool.
Doug Jensen
It is a political troll that is based on nothing more than hate-filled partisan fantasy.
/.
This is
What do you expect? Political discourse at a level greater than (and I quote) "Neener neener neener"?
Besides, this isn't a partisan thing. Both major parties are equally bad about it, it's just that the one in power gets all the attention. The problem is that it seems 95% of people seem to be able to believe one party could be sinister and evil, but their party of choice is completely blameless and altruistic. The fact of the matter is that there is a "culture of corruption", and the party that's guilty of creating and perpetuating it is the U.S. Government. Will Rogers and Mark Twain were right.
Still, to play on a paraphrase of Disraeli (or somebody famous and smarter than me): The U.S. is the worst country to live in the entire world, except for all the others.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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
You have several related problems
Item 1 is easy, http://readerware.com/. It's proprietary but for $80 you get cross-platform (Linux, Mac, MS) software and a barcode wand (repurposed CueCat). It's got a PalmOS display version and a server version. You also get their related CD and Video (VHS and DVD) cataloging software. It's perfectly usable as is, but if you have idiosyncratic needs you could use it as a data entry tool and export to another database. I love this product and have recommended it relentlessly and bought a few copies as gifts. Check it out. I have no relationship with them other than I like their software.
Item 2 requires a bit of concept-busting. Readerware has a 'location' field and I suggest three classes of locations:
boxes - Use photocopy paper boxes, they are strong, uniform in size and have a solid cover which reduces the amount of dust which gets in. You will probably end up with most of your books in boxes, which is good because you get very compact storage and when the whole system is in place your access to your books is as good as if they were on a shelf.
named shelves - You will probably want some books to be on display. Name the shelves that hold these particular books. I have one called 'Best Books' which holds books I really like.
numbered bookcases/shelves - Most shelves won't be special, so just establish a numbering scheme. You might want to label the shelves, there are library bookshelf label holders if you don't want to permanently label your bookcases.
Item 3 again requires some concept-busting. Use all the available techniques.
paper
For portablity, backup and distribution.
computer
Sort of a 'Doh', but presumably you use your machine a lot so you can access your database interactively.
PDA
Good for carrying.
website
Readerware can output html pages which is fine if you just want lookup. For a dynamic website I think you'd need to export to another database but check with the readerware folks.
Item 4 is dependent on what you need but here's my method.
I have two classes of boxes: archival and to-be-read. When I get a book I catalog it and but it in a to-be-read box (labeled something like TBRN where N is a numeral). When I read the book I put it in an archival box (labeled AN where A is the character 'A' and N is a numeral) and update the location.
Print a catalog occasionally, you can refer to it when your computer is busy, during power failures or if you don't keep your machine on all the time. It's also a nice backup. Carry the catalog with you, printed in really small type, etc. Or on index cards if you are into the Hipster PDA. Print a list of the contents of each box and put it in the box so you can tell what's in the box when you open it.
I can fit between 20 and 100 books in a box. Small, thin paperbacks can get 60 - 100 books in a box, big paperbacks often fill a box with 20 books.
Start immediately. Catalog new books without fail. After some time you will find that the percentage of uncatalog books is declining.
I am not currently marking cataloged (versus uncataloged) books. Stickers, (color coded or bar-coded) would work. If you don't want to deface the book you could get strips of colored paper and tuck a strip inside the front cover. Use different colors for different categories.
This works for me, I hope these suggestions are helpful.