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The Home Library Problem Solved
Zack Grossbart writes "About 18 months ago I posted the following question to Ask Slashdot: 'How do you organize a home library with 3,500 books?' I have read all the responses, reviewed most of the available software, and come up with a good solution described in the article The Library Problem. This article discusses various cataloging schemes, reviews cheap barcode scanners, and outlines a complete solution for organizing your home library. Now you can see an Ask Slashdot question with a definitive answer."
Meh, I just married a librarian instead.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
We have approx 3000 books in the house as well as two kids. Dewey-ish classification works fine for us, splitting the books into groups according to their Dewey hundreds (0-99.999, 100-1999.999,...). However we have had to break out some special sections. Robots, programming and electronics have a special area together (breaking Dewey boundaries). All the fishing related stuff goes together (including studies of aquatic instects etc). All the craft books go together (well Dewey does that anyway).
No computer needed.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I have boxes of books in the basement, shelves of books upstairs, stacks of books in th edining room, CDs, DVDs, tapes, records, all over the place.
I solved the problem by ignoring it.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
If the RIAA has their way, making available copyrighted works to people other than the purchaser will be considered copyright infringement. You don't want to get sued by the books publishers, do you?
Then don't create a library. It's that simple.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Now you can see an Ask Slashdot question with a definitive answer
... blah blah (bunch of legalese) blah... and that's what you are legally entitled to do.
That takes all the fun out of it, especially for legal questions.
Example:
Q: Someone is taking credit for my code. What legal recourse do I have?
A1: IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you can kill him for that and call it self defense. It totally won't be murder.
A2: IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you can take his eye for it. Eye for a piece of code or something like that...
A3: IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you're entitled to their wife and the profits from selling his children into slavery.
A4: I AM a lawyer, and depending on how you licensed your code
The experience of an ask slashdot is going down the list of answers, plugging and checking. Surviving long enough to use the one by the actual lawyer is so rewarding. I tell you, I want stand for any sort definitive answer to an ask slashdot.
I got a catholic block.
...you didn't answer any questions about this "wife" artifact you're dealing with while catalogging books. Could you please give us more details?
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
...of my ex-daughter-in-law, who decided to surprise me for my birthday by reorganizing my (3500) books:
By height.
rj
My solution was "marry a librarian". Worked very well for me, you might consider trying it.
That's what I do. And her BS is in Computer Science, so win-win. Except for all the emacs versus vim arguments. Gah! So many years of schooling, and she can't understand that vim is superior?
Except he excluded DDS explicitly, because it was difficult to subcategorize-and-sort below the general ABC.XYZ Dewey number.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
Do you mean "ex-daughter-in-law" or should that say "late daughter-in-law"?
I was facing a similar, but somewhat smaller problem (~1600 books) and worked out a solution using delicious monster. First off I segregated my hardcovers and paperbacks info fiction and non-fiction sections, then scanned them all into Delicious Library, a great mac app. It uses a video camera (I used a camcorder with firewire, but you can use a webcam) to scan the barcode, then gets the info on the book from amazon. Obviously the scanning is the most tedious bit, but since I had to remove everything from the shelves at some point anyway to sort everything it wasn't so ugly. After that was done I figured out how many books fit on a shelf (with some fudge factor) and made a label for each shelf showing what range of authors or subjects should go on that shelf. I did wind up with piles of books on my floor while I removed and reshelved everything but I had to do only a couple of shelf cascades where everything had to be moved down. After the shelves had the right books on them it was fairly easy to alphabetize on each shelf without a ton of book juggling.
Seriously, what the hell?
Doesn't everyone here have a hobby or two they spend a fair bit of money on? Perhaps it's your computer gear, maybe it's model airplanes, maybe it's your car or your audio system. Last I checked, an awful lot of geeks had a particular hobby they enjoyed and spent money on, and they don't have to be 'rich bastards' to do so. They just have to value enjoying themselves over... What? Hording money? So this man's hobby is reading and his library, and he enjoys organizing it in a creative way.
Sheesh.
Someone tagged this rich bastard, but I don't think that's extreme at all. I've kept nearly every book I've ever bought in my life, and I probably have around 800. And I'm only 21 years old (thankfully my parents have an empty garage and I was reading from age 2). Depending on the submitter's age and if he/she is married to another book lover it would be very easy to get to that number.
This is slashdot, right? As in news for nerds. Do nerds no longer enjoy reading?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
We are only around 500-600 books right now, so admittedly it's a smaller issue than 3500, but Delicious Library software combined with what the submitter calls "soft alphabetizing" has worked well for us. We split fiction from non-fiction, then split non-fiction into sub categories. My wife and I each have a handful of categories that we are very interested in, so a dozen sub-categories combined with a general non-fiction catch-all makes most books easy to find. In fact, the only reason we use the software catalog is so we can loan out books to friends and family. What's the point of keeping hundreds or thousands of books, if they go unused? People are always borrowing books (and movies) and we don't have to worry about losing them. Or at least we know whose thumbs to break if the books don't come back.
I find the secret is to lay them spine-down in the attic. Helps immeasurably with heating and cooling costs.
...Bah, your looking at this the wrong way. I say orginize your own books and data a girl who works at Lululemon (a self-described as a yoga-inspired athletic apparel company). Thats what I do. And while we don't have emacs vs vim arguments, we make much better use of our time.
" I find the secret is to lay them spine-down in the attic. Helps immeasurably with heating and cooling costs."
Kevin Smith on Prince
As a professional librarian some of the analysis of the classification systems was not correct. First of all when you catalog a material you need to classify the material (classification schemes include LC, Dewey, etc) and select subject headings (the two most popular ones are Sears and LC subject headings). Even though classification and subject headings both have LC categories these are two separate systems and each has there own books and rules. The Dewey Decimal System number is printed in most books on the back of the title page. It is usually listed under the initials CIP which means cataloging in print. The number will look something like this 000.00 '00 '00 '0000. For home use you only need to use the numbers up to the first the ' . The full dewey number is meant to be used for very large libraries collections of a half million or more. For those books that don't have Dewey numbers you can easily assign Dewey numbers by using the first volume of the Dewey classification series, which is usually available at you local public library. The subject headings are also available in CIP usually with the words/letters Sears: or LC: . The author did not explain how he was attaching the call number to the book. You could do this easily by putting an index card in the book with the proper call number. As for software there is now a readily available open source program called Koha. This program has a built in Z39.50 search engine which allows you to scan in the ISBN number and search libraries that have similar books. You can then select the Machine Readable Record (MARC) which contains the call number subject headings and the bibliographic information. Since Koha is open source it is free, and quite versatile. Many small church and school libraries use Koha, along with the library I work for.
It's nice to see someone actually follow up on an Ask Slashdot question and share the end result.
I have a ginormous amount of books, so I have two problems - one is creating an appropriate space for them, which I have solved, and the other is cataloging.
For organization, I'm simply using PostgreSQL on the house server, which is hugely fast, completely flexible, and allows me to access everything from the web - so I can just drag a laptop in there, or work on any machine in or out of the house. A few lines of Python and bingo, library system. I may clean it up a little and release it, it could be prettier.
I tried Delicious Library (which I do use for my DVD and CD collections) and a couple of other solutions, but for large libraries, they were all too slow.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
There's more to cataloging books than just finding them. We've probably got only a couple thousand, but my wife catalogs them using LibraryThing and also stores them in a local file. To my knowledge, we've never used either to find a book in our house, but these things give us:
I agree that you don't need a computer to find a book in a collection of less than 10,000 books. If you can't organize those physically well enough to find them without a computer, a computer is just going to make it harder. Sorting by fiction/non-fiction and then by author is sufficient for us (with a special computer books section) to find anything pretty quickly. But it's pretty difficult to remember if you already have book sixty-two in the "Accordion of Fate" series or whether you have the third or fourth edition of O'Reilly's "Programming $ELITIST_LANGUAGE_OF_THE_MONTH" when you're out and about. And if you lose your whole collection, the chances of remembering the whole thing are virtually nil unless you have perfect photographic memory, in which case, why do you need to keep books around in the first place? :-)
And the flamebait mod for the parent post was unfair and I hope it's M2ed as such.
What's the point of reading books if you're not going to keep them for reference? I mean you can't remember everything that's in a book, hell I'm lucky if I can remember 10%. But I do remember what kind of stuff is in a book and roughly where it is, so I can look it up when I need to. I may never read a book from cover to cover twice, but there's still a lot of knowledge to be had by keeping it around.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Electronic books still suck. They are device dependent and most importantly, DRM-encrusted.
A friend of mine can come over and borrow one of my ~1,500 real books.
They cannot do that with an e-book. They cannot transfer one of my "e-books" to their reader. I guess publishers want everyone that reads a book to pay? Hmmm. Am I the only one that has ever borrowed a book?
I personally was never into vampire books until my dad gave me a book of his to read. Guess what, since reading the one borrowed book, I bought about 12 vampire books.
Lending books without restrictions creates more profit. End of story. My aunt is big on classic works, works in the public domain. After she lent me two books, I paid for copies of several books that I can download free since they are in the public domain.
I am not trolling, e-books currently suck. The readers are crap, sorry kindle-fans, and the DRM/lock-down is not acceptable to avid readers. When an electronic book comes along that I can lend to a friend without it being tracked, then I might consider it. For now, I still want a physical book. I can lend out a physical book without some book company tracking it or putting a time limit on it.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
There are other books than reference ones, you know. Like, for example, novels.
If you read a book just for entertainment, there's no point in keeping it around once you know how it ends (unless it's really a classic that you want to keep for quoting passages, but that's not a high percentage of books for an average reader).
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
In March of 2006 my wife Mary and I owned about 3,500 books. We both have eclectic interests, voracious appetites for knowledge, and a great love of used bookstores. The problem was that we had no idea what books we had or where any of them were. We lost books all the time, cursed late into the night digging through piles for that one book we knew must be there, and even bought books only to find that we already owned them. There were books on random shelves, books on the floor, we were tripping over books when we walked up and down the stairs. In short, we had a mess.
...and yes we are both engineers.
We needed to get organized. We needed a way to store all of our books so they were easily accessible. We also needed to integrate the two separate book collections which represented one of the remaining holdouts of our single lives. We got together and came up with a list of requirements for our new system.
To complete this project we needed a system to organize all of the books, a way to quickly add books to that system, and a place to store all of the books.
A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place
Our first task was to decide what system we should use for ordering the books. Most of the systems used to organize books are based on combinations of the author's name, the title of the book, and the category of the subject matter. Some of the systems provide a general outline for where a book should be and other systems are very specific. We considered three different systems: alphabetical, Dewey Decimal, and Library of Congress.
Alphabetizing
Probably the most common system used for organizing home libraries is alphabetizing. Books are arranged in alphabetical order by title or author's name. This makes books reasonably easy to find, but puts Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie next to Runner's World Guide to Injury Prevention by Dagny Scott Barrios. This organization makes it difficult to browse books.
Adding categorization to alphabetical sorting can fix that problem. This system organizes books into categories and then alphabetically within those categories. In this system the book Three Seductive Ideas by Jerome Kagan might end up next to The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker because they are both about psychology. This system makes browsing by subject possible, but it requires you to create categories for each book. Should The State, War, and the State of War by Kalevi J. Holsti be categorized as international relations, warfare, or politics? Creating categories which will work well with a set of unknown books is very difficult. We needed a system with established categories.
Dewey Decimal
Dewey Decimal is familiar to just about everyone who came through the American educational system. There is a good chance the library from your grade school used Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC for short). DDC assigns each book a number based on its subject matter. DDC organized all categories into three levels. The system has 10 main classes, 100 divisions and 1000 sections. The book Larousse Gastronomique edited by Prosper Montagne may have a DDC number of 641.3/003 21 - 600 the main class for technology, 641 is the division for food and drink, and 3/003 21 indicates the specific subsection specified in that library.
However, DDC has one big problem. The assigned numbers are not fixed. There is no central authority assigning DDC numbers to books and the same book can have a different number in two different libraries. We didn't want to spend time working out the right catalog number for each of our books; we just wanted
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Following your logic there's no reason to ever buy movies either, because, hey you already know how its going to end. Now assuming you'll never read the book again then I guess there isn't much point to keeping it (aside from lending out books to friends and so on) but lots of people reread novels, and not just the ones that are worth quoting from. For the same reason that people like to rewatch old movies that they have enjoyed, rereading an old book years later, even if it wasn't some masterpiece can be quite enjoyable. In the worst case scenario rereading old novels you enjoyed is a better use of your time than watching mediocre reruns on TV.
I have quite a few books myself and I'm contemplating doing exactly this (except for about 50 books that are rare, super-expensive or used often).
As long as we're making value judgments for strangers, here's my suggestion for you: why don't you sell those last 50 books of yours and give the money to the homeless? If they're valuable, they're worth a lot! If they're rare, then those are the ones that it's most important that you not hoard, right? </smart-assery>
No one has the right to tell someone else what to do with their possessions. And who are you to say he'll never read them? Even so, a book's value isn't only in being read cover-to-cover. Maybe he refers to them every so often. Maybe he wants to keep them for his kids. Maybe he parades his friends through the house and they all borrow books all the time. He's going through great effort to catalog them. That implies that they see some use. If they just sat on the shelves, untouched, he could type up a list as a text file--hell, with a typewriter--and be done with it.
Besides, on a practical note, I don't think there's a terrible shortage of books in the world. I visit my local library often and the shelves are literally 99.9% full at any given moment. If you look at his profile, he's in freaking Cambridge, Mass. I think they're pretty well set for books in that town. And before the "send them to Podunk, IA!" responses come in: go back to my original argument--it's not up to you to decide what someone else should do with their stuff.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Uhm, well, yes. Is there anything wrong with it? You don't say, that there is, but I feel, you imply it...
True, but, again, there is nothing obviously wrong with the situation... In fact, I think, this would be a considerable improvement. If the content-creator (or whoever they sell their creations to) is paid every time the creation is read/watched/listened, the system would be much better at rewarding good creations and punishing the bad ones. It is doing so already, but the technological/legal advances you are forecasting promise to make it much less crude.
In books it is especially unfair, because the author's reward is determined only by the amount of first sales. This means, a book that stays in a family for generations and one, that's thrown out after the first read, reward their authors equally and cost their readers the same... At least, with videos the authors/makers get something every time a movie is rented.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Why not donate, say, 3400 of them that you will never read again to a local public library? I have quite a few books myself and I'm contemplating doing exactly this (except for about 50 books that are rare, super-expensive or used often).
And as a public librarian, I strongly suggest that you ASK your librarian before you do this. If you show up at my library with that number of books, I will probably attempt to make you eat them.
Here's a previous Slashdot comment I made regarding how different public libraries handle donations differently and how they may be either a boon or a burden, depending on the library.
Finally, if he enjoys having 3500 books and his family and friends use them, why shouldn't he have them?
That sounds perfect. I don't suppose you have any idea where one might get one's hands on RFID tags and scanners in bulk? I think one'd have to scan every book's bar code to add it to the database, pair that with an RFID tag and then attach it.
I wonder if it'd be possible to triangulate the tags so you can keep track of the books as they move around without trouble?
Humm...
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
I think my omnipresent female would hurt me if I tried that. :P
Mine would probably offer to help with the threatening as she tends to be a bit OCD about placement of things like books. Besides, she doesn't get enough time playing with blades in her opinion.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
What's fair about someone else having a say in how often I do something that doesn't affect them in the least? If they want to keep what they've done private, I have no problem with that. Once they release it into the wild, for whatever reason, they have lost control of it.
Should the worker in the plate factory be able to tell you what you can or can't eat off of "his" plates?
Ok, so you spend a day installing a beautiful new bathroom for me, and plan to recoup your time investment every time I use the toilet, wash my hands, take a shower (do I have to pay extra if their are two people in the shower? Do you get to watch?) ... what if I decide I don't like it after a week, so I get someone else to come in, knock it all out and put in a different one. Guess you're going out of business!
Per-use charges only make sense when each use actually "costs" something, and even then is inefficient if the costs of tracking and collecting the per-use charges are more than a very small fraction of the actual cost. The people who complain about "having to pay for" cable channels they don't watch are foolish - for most people, they'll end up paying MORE for the channels they do watch, even if the cable company doesn't make any more money. Making it pay-per-view would be even worse, at least from the standpoint of quality and creativity.