Re: [Meta] Wait, you sort your books how???

On Fri, 19 Jul 2024 16:25:01 -0000 (UTC), rkshullat@rosettacondot.com
wrote:

<snippo>

Hijacking the thread...
What software do you (or anyone else reading this) use to organize your
collection? We're in the middle of an extended move with all of our books
boxed and either at the old house, the new house or in storage. There's no
particular order to them and I'd love to just shelve them for "best fit" and
have the software track their location. Ideally I'd like something that could
read the spines (a lot of the books predate UPC codes). We have 14 6-foot tall
bookcases, half with hardbacks and half with double-shelved paperbacks, so
manual entry would be a pain.

I use a Home Database program (cunningly named "Everything I Own") to
record the basic data and a spreadsheet for information that may need
multiple values (such as genre).

The advantage of the spreadheet is that the entire title can fit in
one cell (the database uses fixed-width fields except for one blob,
which cannot be searched); the advantage of the database is that it
can be sorted on each fixed-field column [1] (a spreadsheet is
terribly easy to destroy by not including all columns in a search).

Manual entry is a pain for many people, I suspect -- I wouldn't know
because I actually /enjoy/ it. My favorite job involved a lot of what
I called "complex data entry". My brother, OTOH, wiped out his
database and gave up on rebuilding it book by book. So whatever
solution you come up with, frequent backups to something other than
the hard drive the original is on are highly recommended.

As to the scanning bit ... I suppose in theory scanning the spines and
using OCD might work. Provided, of course, that all spines have the
info you with to obtain. And that the OCD software can identify each
bit (distinguish, for example, between Author and Title so you don't
end up with an entry for /J.R.R. Tolkien/ written by The Hobbit).
Otherwise, you are likely to be spending as much time telling the OCD
which is the title and which is the author and then correcting the
result as you would have spent typing it in.

There used to be such things as paper, usually with "Ex Libris" and a
name printed in an impressive typeface on one side, that you could
glue into each volume. I wonder if an RFID tag containing the author
and title (and other info as desired) and then scanned like any other
RFID could be created. Of course, manual entry would be required to
set this up as well.

Of course, you don't have to type everything: finding it on the
Internet and using copy-and-paste would save a bit of time. Provided
the person/OCD that produced the text on the Internet got it right, of
course.

So I think the short answer is: physical reality is tough, and working
with it is tougher. Pre-planning is good, but the work still has to be
done and, yes, it will take a while.

Of course, you could always hire it done, I suppose. Probably cost a
lot, but at least you would be able to do other things.

[1] EIO can also restrict the display to records matching a range of
values on one of the fields, and then sort within that result by the
various fields. This is, no doubt, standard behavior for these
programs.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"