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Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

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Re: Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

#121

Post by gshdg »

cik wrote: post #120
gshdg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the older ones can be looked up by their Library of Congress number, IIRC from digitizing and barcoding a school library’s catalog a couple decades ago. FWIW, that effort took a half dozen people about 3 months for somewhere on the order of 50,000 books.

100%. But given that I want automatically - the barcode scanner integration with varying tools just doesn't do it. The flip side is that I have books in English, French, Hebrew, and Arabic. The religious Hebrew books don't have ISBNs, unless they came from a North American publisher. The same is true of the Arabic books I have. The French on the other hand went ISBN furiously - or at least enough that it scans true :…

What percentage of each? It sounds like this book barn could use some organization in general, and sorting by language might be a good first step. Then you can scan the English and French as lower hanging fruit, and maybe recruit extra help to deal with the Hebrew and Arabic manually, or something?

Re: Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

#122

Post by emmanueloga_ »

A barn full of old books sounds like the perfect breeding ground for all sorts of bugs... I had an acquaintance that had a problem with bed bugs that apparently started when she got books off of those "Take one book" boxes people put on the front of their houses.

May be worth for your neighbor to check that sort of thing too. Apparently there are dogs that are trained to sniff bedbugs... those furry guys can sniff anything :-) [1]

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/garden/bedbugs-hitch-a-ri...

Re: Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

#123

Post by sandreas »

BeetleB wrote: post #114
sandreas wrote: post #73

You also ask at the forum of http://diybookscanner.org/ Perhaps there are users with experience...

I second DIY Book Scanner. I don't own one but I did scan a book once with it. The scanning part is incredibly fast. I'm sure there are solutions out there for creating a PDF (with OCR).

Once upon a time (years ago) i wrote a tool called bookbuilder, which did exactly this :-) Take a bunch of camera photos of a book on dark background, find the edges and extract the text part :-) I'm not sure, it is still working, because it was java 6... but it is using the excellent boofCV library (http://boofcv.org) If you would like to try it, give it a shot (tesseract 3 is needed):

https://mega.nz/#!EVxA0ZoD!6Uy5A4HexJbewXqkOLsW-4sj5IO5LOGef...

java -jar bookbuilder-0.2.jar --input-path=input --output-file=output/output.pdf --ocr-embed-layer --rotation-degrees=180

Re: Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

#124

Post by bastijn »

sharkweek wrote: post #69
billfruit wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m not the world’s biggest bookworm but I go to Goodwill almost every week and look through the used books for sale. The most fun part is browsing because I never go in knowing what I’m looking for.

That is only fun because they already cataloged them for you. They made a little collection "used books for sale" with just the right size for you to enjoy browsing through. Now imagine you run into a barn full of books, a couple of containers outside, unsorted, all labeled "used books for sale" and no way to tell which were there last week and which weren't. At best you can visit 1% of the books this week, and next week the same 1%, or maybe another. That's what the issue is here.

Most people do not enjoy that more then once or twice.

Re: Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

#125

Post by GBiT »

I have experience working with document storage business. You need to barcode and index all books. Barcode all locations and scan all books to that container they are. It will be like an excel table with 3 columns. Book name, barcode (ISBN or smth) and location barcode. If someone will look up from the catalog you will know the location. If they have ISBN it's possible to write a script to pull book info by it.

Re: Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

#126

Post by kej »

walterbell wrote: post #80

Please, please tag each batch of books with a unique lot number, so they can be associated with a specific estate or deceased bookstore. One or more humans spent a lot of time curating those collections. If one of the lots was well curated, then anyone who finds a book that they like will want to see the other books in that lot. Source: people who have spent years trying to find the names of the 8,000 books in R.A. L…

This would also be good when you inevitably find letters or photographs tucked between pages.

Re: Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

#127

Post by maxlath »

MayeulC wrote: post #32

This sounds like a use-case inventaire.io ought to support. I'll try to ask them about it. They use wikidata for filling up book metadata. Otherwise, as stated elsewhere in this thread, Zotero can usually find books with very little information:ISBN or title. It might be worth trying to set up an OCR with it. In any case, if you go to the length of taking a picture for each book, you might as well save them and make…

yep, inventaire.io could help there, to some extent: they could scan books barcode in bulk from the webapp https://inventaire.io/add/scan , which should find data for most books. But then it gets tricky for books without barcode/ISBN has they would probably have to fill the data manually, which can be quite some work for large inventories. No plans to add OCR, yet ;)

Re: Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

#128

Post by [deleted] »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #12

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…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

#129

Post by cconcepts »

Wow, judging by the response this is a problem a lot of people think about. Am overwhelmed by the helpful info. Obviously have to start at the low hanging fruit as I am working with non-technical people and am relatively non-technical myself. I just tested LibraryThing and it seems very fast and accurate so will give it a whirl.

Again, thanks HN for the overwhelming response.

Re: Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

#130

Post by ahazred8ta »

swayvil wrote: post #110

Dump them all in a shredder. Blow the shreds through a well-lit tunnel full of digital cameras. Assemble the books from the images. Now it's just a software problem. (This isn't my idea. Either Rudy Rucker, Vernor Vinge or Cory Doctorow thought it. I forget exactly who.)

The ham-handed Librareome digital preservation project from Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End

>> "The raging maw was a "NaviCloud custom debinder". The fabric tunnel that stretched out behind it was a "camera tunnel" ... thousands of books that had already been sucked into the "data rescue" equipment"

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