Home book library

Jeffrey Goldberg <nobody.TakeThisOut@goldmark.org> wrote:

> So does anyone know of a system that actually works for keeping track of
> books and helping us locate them within the house?

There are several programs in that area. One could also use a
general-purpose database such as FileMaker, but it can be quite a lot of
work to set such a thing up - a lot more than the modest cost of the
commercial solutions. I was debating doing that for a long time, because
I couldn't find any of the pre-designed solutions that handled one
things that was important to me (see below). But it was such a daunting
job that I never got around to it.

Long ago, I once did my own solution in Turbo Pascal, but that was badly
aging. It was Dos/WIndows only, and the compiler I used doesn't even
work on current WIndows versions, though the app binary still runs. It
never was nearly as fancy as the current commercial solutions, but it
did handle the basics of what I wanted.

Others have mentioned a few of the programs. I'll mention that I use
"Book Collector" from collectorz.com. It probably doesn't mater to most
people, but Book Collector is the only ready-made solution I've been
able to find that makes even a pretext of dealing with the contents of
anthologies, magazines and the like. I want to be able to search for
short stories and be able to find them.

As with most of the other solutions, you can enter books by ISBN
(including with a bar-code scanner), but a lot of my books are older and
don't have proper ISBN's, much less bar codes. Yes, initial entry is a
lot of work. But then, book collecting is sort of a hobby of mine. That
appears to be what it is designed for. I'm afraid there is no magic
solution that will know where all your books are without you doing the
work of telling it. :-( As you said, only a small part of the solution
is software.

It has a "location" field, which I've been using to indicate whch room I
keep the book at. I've been using one of the free-form user fields to
indicate the particular shelf.

--
Richard Maine | Good judgement comes from experience;
email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgement.
domain: summertriangle | -- Mark Twain
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On 2008-02-21 07:37:17 -0800, Lewis <gkreme.TakeThisOut@gmail.com> said:

> In article
> <alpine.OSX.1.00.0802210854220.17240.TakeThisOut@hagrid.ewd.goldmark.org>,
> Jeffrey Goldberg <nobody.TakeThisOut@goldmark.org> wrote:
>
>> So does anyone know of a system that actually works for keeping track of
>> books and helping us locate them within the house?
>
> Bookpedia is a lot like Delicious Library, for books.
>
> My trouble is that most my books are old, and don't have ISBN numbers,
> so there is a ramp-up of entering literally thousands and thousands of
> books in. Not totally by hand, it's search function is quite good.
>
> But, for example, as a test I tried to enter the copy of The Voyages of
> Doctor Doolittle that I got when I was a kid. I was able to find many
> versions, but not the one I had.

LibraryThing.com might be of some use. You can type in a piece of a
title, and it searches through Amazon's database and culls whichever
one you click. If you're going to have enter them all by hand, that
seems more feasible.
--
Thank you and have a nice day.
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Jeffrey Goldberg <nobody.RemoveThis@goldmark.org> wrote:

> I suspect that only a small part of the problem I have can be solved by
> software, but I'm hoping that some "system" that I can actually do along
> with software will help.
> (...)

indeed you need a system. I'd recommend Booxter as one of the most
professional librarian application, way older, more serious and more
efficient than all the delicious-library-likes that are barely more than
internet Amazon-searchers; there are others, including open-source
flavors.

At the very least, you absolutely need one feature: the way to
physically locate your book, and this must be incorporated in the
software.

Get one with either a "location" field in which you'll indicate where
actually you book is (with details: room, shelf, row...), or a
"reference number" if you prefer sticking increasing numbers at the back
of your books, or something like this (keywords...). Don't underestimate
this location thing, otherwise you'll end with only the knowledge that
you indeed have tihis damn book, but don't know where.

Check Booxter, http://www.deepprose.com

H.

--
Frédérique & Hervé Sainct, h.sainct.RemoveThis@laposte.net [fr,es,en,it]
Frédérique's initial is missing in front of the above address
l'initiale de Frédérique manque devant l'adresse email ci-dessus
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On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:04:43 +0000, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote
(in article <alpine.OSX.1.00.0802210854220.17240 DeleteThis @hagrid.ewd.goldmark.org>):

<snip>
>
> My home office, has three large full bookcases. I also have books piled
> up on my desk, under my desk and elsewhere around the room.

<snip>
>
> We don't know what we already own. There have been times when we've
> bought things twice, not knowing that we already had a copy. And we can't
> find anything.

> So does anyone know of a system that actually works for keeping track of
> books and helping us locate them within the house?

Delicious Library will locate them within the house, but although I have it I
don't use it for books because so many of mine are old. I use Filemaker Pro
for that; I bought a discontinued version on eBay because that was all I
needed and it was about half price if I remember. Filemaker will sort much
better than DL IMO and will also produce more flexible reports. I don't keep
the ISBN numbers of my books since many of them don't have them, but I do
keep year of publication. You could easily add a field for "location" so
that you can find all books in a particular room.

[I print a catalogue of my books which I file in a small Filofax and take
with me to book sales - saves a lot of duplication!]


--
Sally in Shropshire, UK
Burne-Jones/William Morris window in Shropshire church with conservation
churchyard:
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[I'm going to put in my comments about all responses in this]

In <0001HW.C3E3766301CD3F49F0182648.RemoveThis@news.individual.net>, Sally Thompson wrote:

> Delicious Library will locate them within the house, but although I have it I
> don't use it for books because so many of mine are old.

I have a fair number of older books, but I also have a lot of Hungarian
language books. Many of them don't have ISBNs and few of those that do
have bar codes.

> I use Filemaker Pro for that;

If I wanted to go that route, I would use MySQL. I've got a server
running doing very little on another machine in the house. But I really
don't want to roll my own. Though I suspect that someone has done
something like that with an Apache PHP or Perl interface. I could go
hunting in that direction too.

As others have said, what I really need to do is make use of a "Location"
field for finding stuff in the house. I've now played with the location
feature within Books, and it does things nicely (provides a quick menu of
all locations it already knows about.)

As for typing, I do have a hacked Cue cat that I've used for scanning bar
codes. Books will also use in iSight camera (if I had one).

As for on-line lookup, Books has an enormous number of plug-ins. It
uses plug-ins for import and export modules as well as for on-line lookup.
Scores of plug-ins in each category seem to exist. For look-up, it
appears that it is very easy to write a plug-in for any Z39.50 query
system. This means that it should be easy for me to get searches for the
Magyar Országos Közös Adatbázis (Hungarian national common database).

From a quick look at what I've seen, there really isn't much I can do
other than just get to work doing it. I need to come up with good naming
conventions the various locations.

I'd like to have two kinds of locations. A proper location (where the
book should be shelved) and a temporary location (shelves in bathrooms,
near beds, etc). I may just have to add a custom field for the temp
location.

So while Librarian Pro and Booxter seem to be highly regarded, I don't at
this point see anything that I could use that they do which Books doesn't.

Cheers,

-j

--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
I rarely read top-posted, over-quoting or HTML postings.
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In article <0001HW.C3E3766301CD3F49F0182648.DeleteThis@news.individual.net>,
Sally Thompson <sallynewsgroup.DeleteThis@yahoo.co.uk.invalid> wrote:

>
> > So does anyone know of a system that actually works for keeping track of
> > books and helping us locate them within the house?
>

EndNote X would offer very powerful and flexible capabilities for
cataloging your books (and many other kinds of documents as well) -- and
if you already have a reasonably well structured list of your books in
some other application, you could probably program an automated
conversion from that listing into EndNote without much trouble.

To the extent that some of your books may also be listed in online
bibliographic databases, you could possibly download supplemental data
on those books from those databases into your EndNote library.

As to "keeping track" of where your books have migrated within the house
(from den to office to bedroom to porch to kitchen to bathroom?) . . .
if my experience is any guide, that's a task that may require not just
electronic but supernatural powers of some sort!
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In <siegman-8D9F96.12222221022008.RemoveThis@nntp.stanford.edu>, AES wrote:

> EndNote X would offer very powerful and flexible capabilities for
> cataloging your books (and many other kinds of documents as well)

Interesting thought. For decades, I've been using BibTeX for the
canonical use of Endnote, but now that my wife is doing almost all of her
academic work in MS Word, I have been looking at something like Endnote
(or Sente looks particularly interesting).

> if you already have a reasonably well structured list of your books in
> some other application,

There are the academic bibliographic data files in BibTeX that we have,
but there is no indication of which books in there we actually own. And
I've got just a few hundred books listed in Books from my occasional
attempts to attack a shelf or two. Books exports to just about anything.

> As to "keeping track" of where your books have migrated within the house
> (from den to office to bedroom to porch to kitchen to bathroom?) . . .
> if my experience is any guide, that's a task that may require not just
> electronic but supernatural powers of some sort!

Maybe I need to put an RFID tag in each book and then have sensors all
around the house. That might be a sufficiently advanced technology to
cover the supernatural.

-j

--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
I rarely read top-posted, over-quoting or HTML postings.
http://improve-usenet.org/
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In article
<alpine.OSX.1.00.0802211343460.17240 RemoveThis @hagrid.ewd.goldmark.org>,
Jeffrey Goldberg <nobody RemoveThis @goldmark.org> wrote:

> [I'm going to put in my comments about all responses in this]
>
> In <0001HW.C3E3766301CD3F49F0182648 RemoveThis @news.individual.net>, Sally Thompson
> wrote:
>
> > Delicious Library will locate them within the house, but although I have it
> > I
> > don't use it for books because so many of mine are old.
>
> I have a fair number of older books, but I also have a lot of Hungarian
> language books. Many of them don't have ISBNs and few of those that do
> have bar codes.

You don't *have* to have ISBNs for Delicious Library. You really only
need ISBNs to do automatic lookups over the internet. You can manually
input any book you want, and give as little or as much information as
you want about each book.

Contrary to some beliefs, Delicious Library was created with book
tracking in mind as well as DVDs. So you may want to give it a trial run
to see if it fits your needs.

--
Note: Please send all responses to the relevant news group. If you
must contact me through e-mail, let me know when you send email to
this address so that your email doesn't get eaten by my SPAM filter.

JR
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In article <gkreme-98C76D.08371721022008.DeleteThis@news.giganews.com>,
Lewis <gkreme.DeleteThis@gmail.com> wrote:

> In article
> <alpine.OSX.1.00.0802210854220.17240.DeleteThis@hagrid.ewd.goldmark.org>,
> Jeffrey Goldberg <nobody.DeleteThis@goldmark.org> wrote:
>
> > So does anyone know of a system that actually works for keeping track of
> > books and helping us locate them within the house?
>
> Bookpedia is a lot like Delicious Library, for books.

Note: Delicious Library does books.

--
Note: Please send all responses to the relevant news group. If you
must contact me through e-mail, let me know when you send email to
this address so that your email doesn't get eaten by my SPAM filter.

JR
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In article <210220080928394419%dave@N_O_T_T_H_I_Sbalderstone.ca>,
Dave Balderstone <dave.RemoveThis@N_O_T_T_H_I_Sbalderstone.ca> wrote:

> In article
> <alpine.OSX.1.00.0802210854220.17240.RemoveThis@hagrid.ewd.goldmark.org>, Jeffrey
> Goldberg <nobody.RemoveThis@goldmark.org> wrote:
>
> > I suspect that only a small part of the problem I have can be solved by
> > software, but I'm hoping that some "system" that I can actually do along
> > with software will help.
>
> Have you looked at Delicious Library?
>
> <http://www.delicious-monster.com/>

We use Delicious Library to manage our 800+ DVD collection here at home.
It does the job well. It's got book support built right in. I suggest
you give it a trial run.

--
Note: Please send all responses to the relevant news group. If you
must contact me through e-mail, let me know when you send email to
this address so that your email doesn't get eaten by my SPAM filter.

JR
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In <jollyroger-FECA00.19145821022008 RemoveThis @earthlink.vsrv-sjc.supernews.net>,...:

> You don't *have* to have ISBNs for Delicious Library. You really only
> need ISBNs to do automatic lookups over the internet.

I'm aware of that. Books (and others) can work with other partial
information to try to find a match, without requiring an ISBN. Does
Delicious Library do searches from non-ISBN information?

> You can manually input any book you want, and give as little or as much
> information as you want about each book.

Of course.

> Contrary to some beliefs, Delicious Library was created with book
> tracking in mind as well as DVDs. So you may want to give it a trial run
> to see if it fits your needs.

At the moment, I need to know that there are specific features that it has
that I don't currently have with Books to invest that much in it.

-j

--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
I rarely read top-posted, over-quoting or HTML postings.
http://improve-usenet.org/
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