61–70 of 142 posts
Ask a professional. And by that I mean - get in touch with Jason Scott: https://twitter.com/textfiles
If we say books and professional, I think of the Internet Archive. They developed their own software which is used on the TT Scribe system, see https://archive.org/details/tabletopscribesystem . These people run an amazing operation, but even for them this still involves a lot of manual labor. In the end, what it takes is a person to grab a book and type in the title.
First, is this really a problem that needs to be solved? Personally, his place sounds like my favorite kind of book shop. A lot of bookworms prefer wandering through dense forests of precariously-balanced piles of books. Is he getting those people, or is he getting people that are expecting Barnes & Noble? If they really do need to be cataloged, then the next thing is to forget all about trying to inventory the entir…
> First, is this really a problem that needs to be solved? For insurance purposes, probably, yeah, especially if there's anything rare, antique, valuable, etc.
Don’t forget about the Dewey decimal system. For the books with ISBNs, you can sort them into boxes by their Dewey decimal. If you don’t have time manually categorize the books without ISBNs, they can be put into “other” boxes and left unsorted
2nd, barcode scanning would certainly be the most effective method.
Numerous queryable catalogues of book and other matrials exist, with Worldcat arguably the most developed of those:
https://www.oclc.org/developer/develop/web-services/classify...
The US Library of Congress also has a huge (if intimidating) amount of information available.
http://fortune.com/2017/05/17/library-of-congress-free-recor...
Figuring out what you hope to accomplish, how, with what resurces (people, software, equipment, space, etc.), in what timeframe, and with what throughput (how fast are materials arriving and leaving, whatis the current backlog) are all considerations. And what end this will serve; book sales, in-person or online, and what is sufficient to that end is also significant.
While we are a bit on this topic: is there a alternative to calibre [1] for managing a shitload (50000+) of ebooks which is still performant? Specially ebooks which have no ISBN (PDF, whitepapers, etc) which only information about them is in their EXIF file data. [1] https://calibre-ebook.com
First, is this really a problem that needs to be solved? Personally, his place sounds like my favorite kind of book shop. A lot of bookworms prefer wandering through dense forests of precariously-balanced piles of books. Is he getting those people, or is he getting people that are expecting Barnes & Noble? If they really do need to be cataloged, then the next thing is to forget all about trying to inventory the entir…
I second this. Also, maybe check with university libraries or university MLS/MLIS programs (Masters of Library Science). This is not a new problem, and they would be aware of existing tools/methodology. Also, maybe you could get a grad student/intern to help.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At a local LP shop, they had a sign saying "If you misshelve a LP, you might as well steal it, at least someone will listen to it" (approximate translation). Shelving in instead central to many specialty shops!
Yes, but there is something to be told for wading through mountains of junk to unearth something notable, I think many book nerds connect to that feeling.
At a first parse, just take a picture of a whole bunch of books spines. Some will be ok, some not.