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Playing Librarian...

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Those of you who know me (and my family) from beyond my blog know that among my our many passions, one of the biggest is books.  And we've got a lot of them.

A couple of years ago, Valorie got me a Flic barcode scanner and a copy of the program Book Collector.  I've been using it steadily since then adding the books from the biggest of the 4 different libraries in our house (yeah, we've got 4 separate libraries in the house, I did say we read a lot of books - they are: grown up fiction, kids fiction, non fiction and teaching materials).

Since I was fortunate enough to take the month of December off this year (one of the benefits of working at Microsoft for as long as I have is that I get a lot of vacation time, some of which was due to disappear), I decided to take on the project of working through the books in the big library.

Since I've been working on it pretty much every day off and on for the past 4 weeks, I've looked at a LOT of books recently.

I've developed a pretty good workflow (it could unquestionably be improved, but this one works) for the process of scanning books:

  1. Start Book Collector.
  2. Head into the library from my computer with the Flic scanner in hand.
  3. Start where I last scanned.
  4. Take a book off the shelf: 
    1. If the back cover contains a UPC code, check the barcode - if it starts 978 or 979, scan it and go to step 5.
    2. Open the book to the inside front flap.  If it contains a UPC code, scan it and go to step 5.
    3. Put the book on the "to be scanned manually" pile.
  5. Take the books on the "to be scanned manually" pile back to the computer.
  6. Plug the scanner into the computer, which will cause the UPC codes to be read in and let the program search for the books.
  7. Add the books found by the scanner to the program.
  8. For each book on the "to be scanned manually" pile:
    1. Check for an ISBN number on the back of the book (usually near the UPC code).  If it's there, enter it and go to step 9.
    2. Check the spine of the book.  If one of the numbers there looks like an ISBN number, enter it and go to step 9 (I often combine step 8.1 and 8.2 together).
      1. If the number on the spine looks like an ISBN number but is 1 digit too short, try typing it in but add an "X" for the last digit.
    3. Look at the page after the title page of the book - sometimes there's an ISBN number there, if so, enter it and go to step 9.
    4. If no ISBN number is found, put the book on the "to be entered manually" pile.
  9. Have the program scan for the ISBN numbers you just entered, verifying each one as it's found, then add the books if they're correct.
  10. For each book on the "to be entered manually" pile:
    1. Enter the title and author for the book manually
    2. Search for the book.
    3. Walk through the items found adding the best fit ("best fit" can be subjective, I try to find an entry with accurate cover art or an accurate publishers number - but the only books that fall into that final set of books are typically more than 20 years old, so your ability to find accurate information on those books is spotty).
  11. Pick up the books you took from the library and to back to step 2.

 

That's it.  So far I'm up to just short of 3000 books scanned, and I'm in the middle of the letter "S" in the biggest of the 4 libraries.  I've added more than 2 thousand books to the program this  month (wow).

Some things I've noticed in the process...

  • We have a lot of books.
  • As far as the scanning process goes, books fall into roughly five categories:
  1. Those with ISBN numbers on their UPC code - this includes most graphic novels, hard cover books and trade books.  Many new paperback books have ISBN13 numbers on their UPC code, but some still don't.
  2. Those with ISBN numbers in a bar code on the inside front cover - essentially this category contains all paperback books from some time in the early 1990s to the present.
  3. Those without ISBN numbers in a bar code on the inside front cover, but with UPC codes that include the ISBN number.  Essentially this category contains all books from the mid 1980s to the early 1990s.
  4. Those without a UPC code on the book, but with an ISBN number (or sometimes a SBN number) inside the book.  This includes most (but not all) books from the 1970s.
  5. Those without ISBN numbers at all.  This includes most books before the early 1970s (yeah, I've got paperback books that date from the mid 1960s).

For books that have ISBN numbers, the amount of information available about the book depends highly on how new it is.  For those that post-date Amazon and Barnes&Noble (the primary data sources for Book Collector), the information available is quite good (including reasonably accurate book cover images).  For older books, the information available is spotty, usually dependant on the information that 3rd party sellers provide to the various online retailers.

We have an awful lot of books.

I'm only beginning the process of taming the book collection, and I've not even started thinking about dealing with how to maintain the library going forward (but I've got some ideas).  As I said, my workflow above could be improved (for instance, I should use a laptop and take the computer to the library to deal with the "to be scanned manually" pile instead of schlepping the pile back and forth.

But working through the piles has absolutely been an enjoyable process - I've also appreciated the opportunity to re-discover old friends, which is always a good thing.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 03, 2008
    And I thought I had a lot of books :)  I've been putting off organising my book collection for a long time now, and I've only got 500-600 or so.  Mind you, they're all in a small apartment, so I'm forever running out of shelf space ;)

  • Anonymous
    January 03, 2008
    If you have books without a barcode or ISBN number try a local bookstore that allows you to order in books they don't have on the shelf.  If you're really nice to them their computer system can search by book title and return you the ISBN number ... !

  • Anonymous
    January 03, 2008
    My father has a similarly large library like yours and has over the years been scanning them into an Access Database by hand, but this seems like a better way forward.  If this program can actually read Access Databases then it could be a worthwhile investment for a birthday.

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2008
    Jamie Akers: I've only had two or three books whose information needed to be manually entered - so far the workflow above has worked for all of our books, including some really old ones.

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2008
    Don't know if you saw it or not, but Slashdot covered the same subject a few weeks ago... "The Home Library Problem Solved" http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/11/1756247

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2008
    Paul: I did notice that, and thought of writing this as a comment to that article.  I found it interesting that he discarded Book Collector in favor of his own solution. I was also quite surprised at his description of his workflow - he claims that he just scans in his books via the UPC code - that works, but it doesn't get you the ISBN number, it gets you the UPC code (which usually can't be looked up in most online databases).

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2008
    I see no one's mentioned http://www.librarything.com yet

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2008
    By "Book Collector" and the Flic scanner mentioned, I'm assuming you mean the software aware from Collectorz.com. You can resolve a couple of your issues (especially the difficulty in matching manually entered older books) by adding the Library of Congress as one of the data sources. I usually end up with a cover picture that I can identify pretty quickly.

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2008
    Several times in my life I started to build a nice collection of books but they were always very specific in subject.  Almost without exception I don't read non-text/non-instructional books.  Fiction - bah, don't care for it.  Biography - bah, don't care for it.  General non-fiction - bah, don't care for it.   I once had a vast collection of electrical engineering texts - all glistening new.  I bored of electrical engineering and gave most away to interested colleagues and students.  The rest I sold on Ebay - many for substantially more than I paid for them. Then I built a sizable collection of computer science, programming, and mathematics texts.  I bored of software development and gave many away.  The remainder were on outdated languages and the like and ended up in a dumpster. Now I have a large collection of art and painting books.  For the first time I have many non-texts, although these are mostly gallery collections and books on specific artists.  To be truthful I mostly look at the pictures :-).  This collection won't grow as large as my prior ones because I'm not a tenth the painter that I was an engineer or programmer, and I likely never will be, so I can't afford to keep buying art books.  Besides, I've already absorbed or tired of a third of these and many of the others are focused on movements that I've declared unworthy of being called art. I think I'd now like to gather a lot of generic books on the various sciences.  Dictionaries, encyclopedias, introductory texts and the like - you know, reference books in general.  Yeah, that's the ticket.  I'd probably keep most of those.

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2008
    KenW: I'm using the LoC as one of my data sources.  It doesn't help for most of the older books, they're not listed - I don't know why, but they're not listed. Larry Lard: I looked at LibraryThing a while ago, and wasn't very impressed, to be honest.  It doesn't have nearly the level of automation support that Delicious Monster or Book Collector has (and I don't have a Mac, so DM is out of the question).

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2008
    Wow! I thought I had some old books! :-) Well, I tried.

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2008
    Umm... Larry, have you made a backup of that database?

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 05, 2008
    I have very old books as well. I wonder how I would categorize and inventory them if I ever did my library? I guess I have never given it much thought until now. I have books from the 1800s and some even older than that. I love books, especially old ones.

  • Anonymous
    January 05, 2008
    Wow, 1880's?  I have no idea how to handle that kind of book - my stuff goes back to the early to mid 60's (which is when I started accumulating books).

  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2008
    Something I find fascinating is the storage needs implied by a personal collection of 3000 books.  I actually can't tell if 3000 is the running count, or the total, but nevertheless... I make some liberal assumptions in the example below, but I'd be interested in seeing how it matches up with reality. Let's take an arbitrary average book width of .75 inches, resulting in 187.5 feet worth of storage needs. Next, let's take an arbitrary average book shelf with 5 shelves, 22 inches wide, giving 9.2 feet of storage per bookshelf. Grand result: 21 bookshelves.  I suspect that my number of 3000 is just hte running total, given that Larry mentions 4 libraries, but it's interesting to just envision what that might look like.

  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2008
    "Yeah, it takes a lot of storage to hold all of those books." But I bet it is worth every penny you had to pay for the extra room in the house. My parents have a huge library like yours and it is one of the things I like best about visiting home. I can browse through all my Dad's books and see what new stuff he has. I always come away with some great reads from it.

  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 08, 2008
    My parents had 3 kids. When we moved out one by one, the rooms turned into libraries. Then, around the time they turned 65 they moved to a bigger house. More shelves. When I was at their place for Christmas they were a little embarrassed when they let slip they also have a lockup thing at a storage place for more books... Dad has an awesome sci-fi collection. (BTW Larry are you a packrat? My parents (and me) can't throw anything out).

  • Anonymous
    January 08, 2008
    steveg: Yeah, we're packrats.  We're trying to fix that, but it's hard.

  • Anonymous
    January 14, 2008
    What's the payoff down the road for spending the time now creating this catalog? Let's say you look for a book in the catalog and it's not on the shelf.  What do you do?  This seems like a never ending project. Here is an interesting test.  Create a random sample of a 100 books from your collection and see how many can be obtained from your local library (including inter-library loan).  I read a lot and never seem to have a problem getting the books I want from my library. About 20 years ago I helped a friend carry about 1,000 books up to a 5th floor walk up in Manhattan.  I think my back still hurts.

  • Anonymous
    January 14, 2008
    The comment has been removed