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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/
@jgoerzen never heard of librarything; is it an online service letting you build your own lists? i was hoping for smth local with a base that could be sync'ed between myvown machines, but capable of pulling book info from… places.
anyways, will research it later today. thank you!
@tivasyk Yes, I too would have preferred something local, but I didn't find any such thing. But, at least they let me do a full export of absolutely everything in my account in two useful formats, so I figure I at least have a local backup I can resort to if something happens at LT. They seem to be a small company doing good things, so that's good.
@jgoerzen i completely see your point! i've been looking for a similar solution as you, albeit the size of my problem (or library) is much smaller.
still, i don't think i'll go the librarything way :-( for me, centralisation, partial ownership by amazon and no safeguards against eventual sellout are red flags.
as primitive as trying to replicate it with #openlibrary lists looks at the moment, i'll rather try that one.
still, thank you for bringing this up!
@tivasyk You might be thinking of #Goodreads with that sellout to Amazon. I migrated my data from Goodreads to #LibraryThing because I had long been uncomfortable with that at Goodreads. Also, while LibraryThing does have social aspects, it is far stronger at organizing and managing your own collection.
I looked into #Bookwyrm, which is a Fediverse project. But it was far more about social than organizing, and wouldn't have helped with my project.
@jgoerzen the wikipedia article tells us the librarything is partly owned by amazon; i don't know if that is true.
when i think about possible sellouts, that means anything privately owned can be bought and sold… unlike structures like archive.org (behind openlibrary) or bookwyrm. again, i don't know for real.
i have a bookwyrm profile, but you're right, it's not nearly (or at all) fitting the bill of cataloguing :-(
@older in my (very primitive) case — yes, an inventory with tagging would do the trick for me; i don't think i could invest into learning what you'd call the proper cataloguing :-(
@older @inventaire @tivasyk Wow, I hadn't known of #inventaire! Thanks for mentioning that!
From a quick look, it doesn't have fields for LCC (Library of Congress Classification), publication date, etc. I did a test import of a book: https://www.librarything.com/work/25717416/details/268620860 vs https://inventaire.io/entity/isbn:9780937175101 . LT pulled publication date, LCC, Dewey, publisher, and correct cover from its databases and the Library of Congress. Inventaire got the wrong cover, has no LCC or Dewey, and doesn't support tags. 1/
@older @inventaire @tivasyk So Inventaire won't meet my needs right now, but I note it can import a Librarything JSON so I'm going to keep my eye on it because I would love to switch to locally-hosted if it does in the future! Thanks again for mentioning! /end
@jgoerzen @older @tivasyk I opened a ticket on this missing classification properties that you are welcome to follow https://github.com/inventaire/inventaire/issues/754 As for self-hosting, we got funding to work on it this year so stay tuned! :)
— Maxime
@inventaire @older @tivasyk That is fantastic, thank you! Do you think Inventaire might also support tagging at some point?
@jgoerzen @older @tivasyk You mean tagging inventory items, right? That's not a feature we have considered so far, investing more efforts in collaborative structured data, in the hope to improve everyone's inventory browsability at once (better authors/genres/subjects data…). The closest to tags we have would be shelves, which allow inventory subdivisions, but that's not the same. If you think there is a good case for adding tags, you are welcome to comment here https://github.com/inventaire/inventaire/issues/756
@inventaire i was actually surprised that a book can be on two shelves at the same time; it's… unintuitive, and shelves basically _are_ like tags in this case :-/
@tivasyk Ahh, got it. Yeah, AbeBooks owns 40% of LT, and Amazon now owns AbeBooks. I haven't seen any Amazon influence on the site, though -- different from Goodreads. LT seems to be evolving at a slightly faster pace than Goodreads, which I guess is somewhat amazing considering that Goodreads is an Amazon unit now. OTOH, I do take frequent exports of my data.
Anyhow, I think you and I are in full agreement. I'd rather host locally. LT has its warts, but I haven't found anything better yet.