...but even I am amazed. Heather introduced me to Book Collector, and I've been thrilled. I've long wanted to make an inventory of our books, and had made a few half-hearted beginnings, but the enormity of the project always dragged me down.
Enter Book Collector. I can use a barcode scanner (borrowed from Heather), read the UPC code on the back of the book, and Book Collector searches the Internet for matches. It downloads all sorts of information: cover image, title, author, publisher, summary, and often much more, depending on what is available.There's one problem: a large proportion of our books are too old to have UPC codes. But that's okay, I can enter the ISBN by hand, and then initiate the same search process.
We also have a large quantity of books too old to have ISBN's. For those the program will search on title and author.
There's still some of clean up that needs to be done with many of the book entries, and I've had to make liberal use of our scanner, because few of the older books have cover images available online. However, the process is so much faster than entering all the data by hand. A little concentrated effort over the past few days has enabled me to finish entering all the books—not that we own, but that are in one room of our house. The family room. It probably has the second-largest collection of books, although I won't be sure till I'm done.
But here's the shocker: I catalogued 263 books in the family room alone! I knew we had a lot of books, but that astonished me. I wish I could say I've read them all! I'm working on it....
I'm not ready to make the half-baked list public, but curious family members can see what I've entered so far via the Library link on our home page. You won't see all the nifty views and searching and filtering possibilities available in the program itself, but it's fun to browse anyway. The books (at the moment, anyway) are sorted alphabetically by author.What a fantastic idea! This is something that I could get into doing. I'm excited to see your library. :)
(Heather, where did you find the scanner?)
~liz
I bought the scanner in a package deal with the book collector software. It's a bit pricey, I'd say a mid-grade barcode scanner from what I saw in my research. But with the package deal, it was the best price for the features. Plus now it's getting double duty since Mom can use it!
I may just have to break down and get one. I went to a book sale a couple of weeks ago and found I had purchased at least three books that I already owned. At 50 cents a piece, it wasn't a huge mistake, but it would be nice not to repeat.
The package is a pretty good deal, particularly if you are interested in the other cataloguing software in the bundle. So far everything as worked quite well. Sometimes something related to scanning causes the program to become unresponsive, but it has not been annoying enough to worry about. You can download a trial version of the software to check out, if you want.
I can report that I finished another room today, though that's not saying much since it was Janet's room, and I only catalogued the few books I'm pretty sure are actually mine. :)
Memo to young parents: It's really easy, when your children are young, to think of their books, toys, clothes, etc. as community property. This works all right at first, but when it comes time for them to go off and form their own households, you find yourself wanting to know which books, CD's, and Christmas ornaments belong to whom!
I'm not so sure anymore about the necessity of the scanner. It's fun to use, and if the majority of your books have bar codes, it is fast and fun to scan them. But it's almost as fast to enter the ISBN by hand.
I say this not only because of the expense of the scanner if you don't buy the package, but also because I've been having trouble with it. The main problem is that it is a serial device and few computers these days have serial ports, so you have to use a serial/USB converter. I have one, and it works, but it also causes the machine to crash with alarming regularity. Sometimes it just becomes unresponsive and I can recover by killing the task, but sometimes it just decides to reboot and lose all the data since the last save. Microsoft suggests downloading a new driver, but the link they provide is broken, and when I go to the site the link refers to, it's in Chinese. I can get an English translation, but my converter is a Belkin, and the recommended site is something called Magic Control Technology, so of course I wonder what I will be doing to the computer if I install the patch. It's probably all fine, but you can see why I found it easier just to type the codes in by hand.
Entering the codes is actually the fastest part of the process. If you're not as obsessive as I am, and are content to let the program use its best guesses instead of wanting to get things as accurate as possible, and are willing to use the standard book icon instead of a cover image, it can go faster, of course.
The best use of the scanner would be if you have lots of scannable books on a different floor from your computer. Then you can scan a whole bunch and bring the data to the computer. In our one-floor house, I find it works best to bring the books themselves to the computer, because so many of them have to be entered by hand, anyway.
Your USB to serial is probably just kind of broken. I have used three or four different models, and they have all worked fine. Some require a driver from the cd, and some have use a Microsoft-built-in driver.
Update: Five rooms down, two to go. The count so far: over 600. I cheated in the living room. I had thought that would be an easy room because the shelves are small. I forgot that music is also small.... Much of the music (particularly the piano books) is catalogued, but I also resorted to lumping a lot of music together, to be catalogued later. Maybe.
I've updated the online list, only now it's alphabetical by title. Until I change it again.
Whew. Only one more room to go. My office. Since everything else has taken longer than expected, what can I expect from the room I know is overflowing with books?
I can't say that I'm completely done with the other rooms, but I flatly refuse to worry about books that are in boxes. A book in a box does not exist.
The count so far: about 850. This is somewhat misleading, because multi-volume works often have just one entry. Even I have my limits. Good enough is better than perfect!
