14
votes
Home book cataloguing suggestions
So I have a have maybe a few hundred books at home and I think it's time I put together a collection of what I have. I'd love a database of author / title / publication year / physical location that I could search through ideally.
Is there software that can help with this? I had a brief look at LibraryThing, but I think it costs money for the quantity of books I'm looking at. I briefly toyed with the concept of making my own app that could scan an ISBN to speed up the process (since most will have ISBNs). I wonder what the people of Tildes suggest? Has anyone here done something similar?
I have a 3500+ volume library in my house. I just use a Google Sheets spreadsheet that I keep updated manually. Started it a long time ago and now it's grown a lot. I list Author/Title/Goodreads Score/Date Originally Published/Date of this Edition/Location in my library (Pre-1900, Post1900, Sci-Fi, Art, ect)/Publisher of the edition I have/Softcover/Hardcover/Have I read it?/Book Condition 1-5.
The advantage of using Google Sheets is that I have easy access to the list from my phone when I am out at used bookstores hunting, good luck remembering all the books you have when you have 3500+.
I couldn't find a real solution that I liked anywhere online, ISBN would be great, but a lot of my books are old enough that they have no such thing, or I wanted to be able to record the exact edition I have and that became difficult. I also wanted a very dense list I could scroll through when out shopping instead of having to search my collection. Since I'm collecting and reading mostly older literature (I have very little published in the last 40-50 years) the Goodreads scores are actually decently useful in the same way the ratings of older movies on IMDB are still useful.
Works really well for my use case but it's painful to setup, once you have it though it's easy to keep updated. HERE is an example of my Faulkner collection out of my spreadsheet.
Woah, 3500 books sorted books is impressive! I bet they look great on those shelves.
I am beginning to think that your setup is the best option. The portability and the ability to add my own columns just sound too useful and it saves me the hassle of making my own software for the job. Plus it is exportable as a CSV file if I ever want to switch services so I'm not tied to Google forever. No free option seems to grab much information from an ISBN so I'd be entering the information manually anyway. Thanks!
The library is an entire room, all walls floor to ceiling books on shelves. It's my pride and joy :)
That's impressive. I bet visitors who see it want to break out in song and dance like Belle, in Beauty and the Beast. Internally at least. I almost wanted to buy this house because it has a day bed / reading nook. The correct solution is to build a cozy reading nook at home, of course. But I don't have the carpentry experience to envision how it'll work with the spare room. (Actual carpentry execution I might actually be able to handle)
I actually just did this! I don't have nearly as many books as you, but I used a rather obscure software called BiblioteQ. It fit my needs: open source, OpenLibrary/LoC/etc. lookup, self-hosted. Documentation is a little sparse, but I was able to figure some things out after playing with it. I like that it has options for different types of materials, too! I collect a lot of field guides and reports from my state wildlife office, and I'm able to catalogue these things without needing an ISBN. It's nifty!
I am in a similar situation to yours. A few years ago, I decided to physically sort my books by Dewey Decimal Classification, but it was mostly a waste of time because I had to spend a few minutes trying to find the appropriate classification number for each book. I eventually abandoned Dewey and switched to using COBISS IDs to sort my books, since all of them have already been classified in the COBISS system. I still haven’t finished the sorting, because I’ve been looking for a similar system for software cataloguing (COBISS is only available to libraries, sadly) so I could organize my shelves and build a database at the same time. In my opinion, whatever solution you choose is going to be very time-consuming initially, but it’s worth it once you’ve catalogued your initial collection.
In terms of software, there isn’t any one tool that fits everything. I’ve tried Tellico (by KDE, open source). It lets you search different sources and pull metadata for books by ISBN. Even though it’s the closest to what I’m looking for, it crashed twice in the first ten minutes when I tried to customize it. It didn’t save anything, so I lost everything I entered, which makes it too unreliable for my use case. I also experimented with Obsidian before, using custom templates, but it felt too hacky. Obsidian recently added a first-party Bases plugin, which looks promising, but I haven’t tried it yet. A big plus for Obsidian is that everything is stored in Markdown and can be synced across devices. The downside is that once you start relying on plugins, you end up locked into Obsidian, even though Markdown itself is an open standard.
I’m not a fan of ISBNs personally. Most of my books don’t have one, and even if they did, there would always be a few without it, which would throw the system off. Instead, national library numbers (Library of Congress or the previously mentioned COBISS IDs) are probably more reliable anyway. I’d assume 99% of the books you own are also catalogued by your national library, and you can use those numbers to sort your physical collection just like a librarian would.
In my opinion, the most useful approach would be something extendable, like a custom CSV (even though some people advise against CSV) or an SQL database. A system that can grow and adapt to your needs would ultimately serve you best.
It's a shame the software for this task seems so lacking. I'd make my own, but I haven't found a good (free) API to pull ISBN information from.
I hadn't thought to check my national library, but it is quite limited unfortunately. It only has ~400,000 books catalogued, probably because it focuses on nationally published works.
I think you are right that whatever solution I go with, I'll have to bite the bullet and stick with it even if it starts slow.
You could try TheStoryGraph. They can scan ISBNs, you can mark particular books (or editions of books) as owned, and you could create tags for where they're located. You can go to your owned books and sort them various ways.
I used to catalog my media. When I did, I just used libreoffice base. You can put in whatever fields you think will help you and can even design the interface and whatever reports you’d like to run on them. You can even get a cheap barcode scanner if that’s how you like to roll.
I unfortunately don't remember the details but there was a discussion of how to approach this in the book algorithms to live by. It's a great book. I recommend it also for other reasons, but the library catalog approach was in one short chapter.
Chaotic neutral but if you just want fast results you could sort them how you like and then just take a picture of the spines. As you refine your ordering system and notes, eventually you end up with something like this:
https://prelingerlibrary.org/stacks/
I use BookBuddy (there are two available on iOS, i mean this one: https://www.kimicoapps.com/bookbuddy).
It doesn't require an account or any of this nonsense, is local but you can backup your library to the cloud if you want, and allows you to scan many books at once using their barcode.