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We have a problem. Our family reads. We have lots of books. And they haven't been well-organized. We have run out of storage space. So it's time to get organized. Here's the result. 1/
We are a family of readers. We have somewhere north of 1000 books in our house, and they haven't been well-organized. We have an assortment of bookshelves, which have loosely been organized by which person originally bought the book.... but not well.
So, decision number 1 was: how are we going to organize them? Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress Classification (LCC)? I went with #LCC because we tend to have a lot on certain topics (eg, Kansas history), and it is great with that. 2/
Then, how to track? I wound up using #LibraryThing. It integrates with the Library of Congress and other libraries, plus Amazon, for pulling in metadata. Its site is designed to work well with barcode scanners (I found the Honeywell 1900G-HD works really well). It also has CSV and JSON exports, plus CSV imports. I can also add all my books from local authors that aren't in any database, etc. 3/
From there, I wrote a Rust program to generate labels. It drives Labelle with the new batch mode I wrote for it at https://github.com/labelle-org/labelle/pull/72 . The Rust program can take LCC and ISBN and generate the label, or it can take ISBN and do a lookup to the exported data and generate the label from that. Great with the barcode scanner.
The labels themselves encode the ISBN in the QR code. If no ISBN is present, they hold a local barcode number generated by LibraryThing. 4/
Then when done, we sort and shelve! I bought some 18x48x85" steel shelving units from Global Industrial that should save us a lot of space. end/