Cataloguing the Library of Babel

[nmg]

So I exaggerate - we're not quite at the level of certain other bibliophiles, but we do have upwards of 3-4000 books in Gark Villa. Unfortunately, I also have a poor memory so I'm forever buying duplicate copies of books that I already own, or lending out books and forgetting who to. One of my projects for paternity leave and Christmas was to investigate software for cataloguing our collection, and perhaps make a start on the task. However, the garklet took up more of my time than I'd envisaged (that is, all of it) and I didn't get very far.

perdita_fysh mentioned the software that she'd been using to keep track of her books: Delicious Library. Given that I have a shiny new MacBook Pro, I thought I'd take a look. Five minutes later, I found myself $40 lighter.

Delicious Library is a very slick piece of software that automates much of the tedium of building a library catalogue. It uses the iSight camera to read barcodes, and automatically retrieves the bibliographic information from Amazon. In addition to books, it can also catalogue CDs, DVDs and computer games. It has minimal circulation functionality for tracking loans, but this is nicely integrated into iCal and the address book.

It isn't perfect, and there are a number of areas for improvement, some of which may be dealt with in the next version: integration with online library catalogues is essential for high quality metadata, since the Amazon data is uniformly dreadful (LOC or COPAC would be my choices here, and services like CDDB would suffice for music); it needs to improve the way it handles metadata (representing editors as well as authors would be a good start); it needs smart collections along the lines of iTunes' smart playlists.

There are other systems with similar (or greater) functionality, such as Bookpedia from Bruji or the open source Books, but Delicious Library is better finished and more robust.

Comments

[jacint.livejournal.com]

Meh - I've packaged up most of my humungous book collection into lots of crates already, in an effort to make the house look presentable. Now, I've worked back from the volume of crates to a figure of over 2k books.... which clearly isn't enough. However, as 2 specialist subjects, it may still be ahead of the game (that is, science fiction and fantasy fiction (and never the twain shall meet)). I had always intended on cataloging it properly, and I made an attempt some years back using a dictaphone, but I've always balked at getting a proper barcode scanner. However, if I could amortize the cost against a small fee for lending it out to all you other bibliophiles, then perhaps I could justify buying one. It took a long while for the websites to publish ISBNs, but now they do, it's possibly worth while.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Given the resolution of most webcams now, you may find that there's PC software that does the trick of 'scaning' a barcode from an image...