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."

Comments

easier

[cowscows]

Meh, I just married a librarian instead.

Re:easier

[gstoddart]

wife...? what is this 'wife' that you speak of

Wife is a slightly different version of the same product as Girlfriend.

It comes with some more restrictive licensing, and there's a little bit of vendor lock in, but some people don't object.

Opinions seem to be mixed on if you should stick with Girlfriend, but it largely depends on your needs and long-term plans. Many people who add the add-on package Child 1.0 end up going this route, but it's not mandatory.

It's got higher maintenance costs than Girlfriend, but has some features not found in that package as well, so it's a trade off.

Sometimes upgrading a version of Girlfriend can have a steep learning curve, as they tend to randomly change features with each major version, so you should really determine if your current version of Girlfriend meets your needs before you upgrade.

YMMV.

Cheers

Re:easier

[kryten_nl]

Having both Wife and Girlfriend installed may cause serious problems. Although some people have reported long term success, there have been no definitive studies.

Organise?

[sm62704]

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

Takes All the fun out of it

[explosivejared]

Now you can see an Ask Slashdot question with a definitive answer

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 ... blah blah (bunch of legalese) blah... and that's what you are legally entitled to do.

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.

Oh, painful memory

[Deadstick]

...of my ex-daughter-in-law, who decided to surprise me for my birthday by reorganizing my (3500) books:

By height.

rj

I solved this problem.

[DdJ]

My solution was "marry a librarian". Worked very well for me, you might consider trying it.

Date a Librarian

[Henry V .009]

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?

Just to clarify

[pjt33]

Do you mean "ex-daughter-in-law" or should that say "late daughter-in-law"?

Why is this tagged richbastard?

[evanbd]

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.

Not a rich bastard

[bogjobber]

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?

Re:Library problem unsolved: Add kids

[russ1337]

whatever you do, DO NOT LET THE ROBOTS NEAR THE CRAFT BOOKS!

I happened to me once, I still have the scars.

Thank you!

[Fr05t]

It's nice to see someone actually follow up on an Ask Slashdot question and share the end result.

Re:You don't

[fyngyrz]

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.

Re:You don't

[Hatta]

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.

Re:Nowq he has to solve the home server meltdown .

[an.echte.trilingue]

It doesn't appear slashdotted to me, but just in case:

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.

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. ...and yes we are both engineers.

1. It needs to be easy to find a book.
2. It needs to be easy to add a book to the system.
3. The systems needs to handle foreign language books.
4. It needs to be easy to maintain the system going forward.
5. The initial cataloging effort can't take forever.

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