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The Home Library Problem Solved

Posted by kdawson on Tue Dec 11, 2007 02:02 PM
from the ask-and-it-is-given dept.
Books Media Slashback
Zack Grossbart writes "About 18 months ago I posted the following question to Ask Slashdot: 'How do you organize a home library with 3,500 books?' I have read all the responses, reviewed most of the available software, and come up with a good solution described in the article The Library Problem. This article discusses various cataloging schemes, reviews cheap barcode scanners, and outlines a complete solution for organizing your home library. Now you can see an Ask Slashdot question with a definitive answer."
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[+] Ask Slashdot: Solving the Home Library Problem? 579 comments
zgrossbart asks: "My wife and I have about 3,500 books. We can't find anything. All the books are in random order. We want to find a solution for organizing our books. We have a barcode scanner, but I'm not sure the best way to use it. I want a solution that is easy to maintain going forward and makes books easy to find. I also want the data in an open format. I'm think about using MySQL right now, but I'm open to other suggestions. What software do other people use to organize their home libraries?"
Submission: The Home Library Problem Solved by zgrossbart (535154)
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    • It doesn't appear slashdotted to me, but just in case:

      In March of 2006 my wife Mary and I owned about 3,500 books. We both have eclectic interests, voracious appetites for knowledge, and a great love of used bookstores. The problem was that we had no idea what books we had or where any of them were. We lost books all the time, cursed late into the night digging through piles for that one book we knew must be there, and even bought books only to find that we already owned them. There were books on random shelves, books on the floor, we were tripping over books when we walked up and down the stairs. In short, we had a mess.

      We needed to get organized. We needed a way to store all of our books so they were easily accessible. We also needed to integrate the two separate book collections which represented one of the remaining holdouts of our single lives. We got together and came up with a list of requirements for our new system. ...and yes we are both engineers.

      1. It needs to be easy to find a book.
      2. It needs to be easy to add a book to the system.
      3. The systems needs to handle foreign language books.
      4. It needs to be easy to maintain the system going forward.
      5. The initial cataloging effort can't take forever.

      To complete this project we needed a system to organize all of the books, a way to quickly add books to that system, and a place to store all of the books.

      A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place

      Our first task was to decide what system we should use for ordering the books. Most of the systems used to organize books are based on combinations of the author's name, the title of the book, and the category of the subject matter. Some of the systems provide a general outline for where a book should be and other systems are very specific. We considered three different systems: alphabetical, Dewey Decimal, and Library of Congress.

      Alphabetizing

      Probably the most common system used for organizing home libraries is alphabetizing. Books are arranged in alphabetical order by title or author's name. This makes books reasonably easy to find, but puts Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie next to Runner's World Guide to Injury Prevention by Dagny Scott Barrios. This organization makes it difficult to browse books.

      Adding categorization to alphabetical sorting can fix that problem. This system organizes books into categories and then alphabetically within those categories. In this system the book Three Seductive Ideas by Jerome Kagan might end up next to The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker because they are both about psychology. This system makes browsing by subject possible, but it requires you to create categories for each book. Should The State, War, and the State of War by Kalevi J. Holsti be categorized as international relations, warfare, or politics? Creating categories which will work well with a set of unknown books is very difficult. We needed a system with established categories.

      Dewey Decimal

      Dewey Decimal is familiar to just about everyone who came through the American educational system. There is a good chance the library from your grade school used Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC for short). DDC assigns each book a number based on its subject matter. DDC organized all categories into three levels. The system has 10 main classes, 100 divisions and 1000 sections. The book Larousse Gastronomique edited by Prosper Montagne may have a DDC number of 641.3/003 21 - 600 the main class for technology, 641 is the division for food and drink, and 3/003 21 indicates the specific subsection specified in that library.

      However, DDC has one big problem. The assigned numbers are not fixed. There is no central authority assigning DDC numbers to books and the same book can have a different number in two different libraries. We didn't want to spend time working out the right catalog number for each of our books; we just wanted

  • You burn them, or at least the ones which you're unlikely to read again.

    Or if that offends you, set them free [bookcrossing.com]...

     

    • Or if that offends you, set them free...

      Yes for the books that he isn't planning on reading, there are many urban centers that will take them. This guy's collection is large enough for him to consider a loaning system as a public service, if he's the philanthropic type.
      • I have about ~7500 books at home (I have approximately 750 in my home office at the moment) and I know people always want to borrow books. If I had a way to track them, I'd be much happier to lend them out, but of course the article is slashdotted.

        What I used to do was create a database as they went out- put in the ISBN, date, time, author, title, etc, etc, etc, and the lendee. Worked pretty well, and I slowly built up the database book by book.

        • Re:You don't (Score:5, Informative)

          by fyngyrz (762201) * on Tuesday December 11 2007, @02:52PM (#21660925) Homepage Journal

          I have a ginormous amount of books, so I have two problems - one is creating an appropriate space [flickr.com] for them, which I have solved, and the other is cataloging.

          For organization, I'm simply using PostgreSQL on the house server, which is hugely fast, completely flexible, and allows me to access everything from the web - so I can just drag a laptop in there, or work on any machine in or out of the house. A few lines of Python and bingo, library system. I may clean it up a little and release it, it could be prettier.

          I tried Delicious Library (which I do use for my DVD and CD collections) and a couple of other solutions, but for large libraries, they were all too slow.

          • That sounds perfect. I don't suppose you have any idea where one might get one's hands on RFID tags and scanners in bulk? I think one'd have to scan every book's bar code to add it to the database, pair that with an RFID tag and then attach it.

            I wonder if it'd be possible to triangulate the tags so you can keep track of the books as they move around without trouble?

            Humm...
                • I think my omnipresent female would hurt me if I tried that. :P

                  Mine would probably offer to help with the threatening as she tends to be a bit OCD about placement of things like books. Besides, she doesn't get enough time playing with blades in her opinion.

    • Re:You don't (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Hatta (162192) on Tuesday December 11 2007, @03:06PM (#21661207) Journal
      What's the point of reading books if you're not going to keep them for reference? I mean you can't remember everything that's in a book, hell I'm lucky if I can remember 10%. But I do remember what kind of stuff is in a book and roughly where it is, so I can look it up when I need to. I may never read a book from cover to cover twice, but there's still a lot of knowledge to be had by keeping it around.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by TuringTest (533084)
        There are other books than reference ones, you know. Like, for example, novels.

        If you read a book just for entertainment, there's no point in keeping it around once you know how it ends (unless it's really a classic that you want to keep for quoting passages, but that's not a high percentage of books for an average reader).

        • Re:You don't (Score:4, Insightful)

          by HybridJeff (717521) on Tuesday December 11 2007, @03:42PM (#21661849) Homepage
          Following your logic there's no reason to ever buy movies either, because, hey you already know how its going to end. Now assuming you'll never read the book again then I guess there isn't much point to keeping it (aside from lending out books to friends and so on) but lots of people reread novels, and not just the ones that are worth quoting from. For the same reason that people like to rewatch old movies that they have enjoyed, rereading an old book years later, even if it wasn't some masterpiece can be quite enjoyable. In the worst case scenario rereading old novels you enjoyed is a better use of your time than watching mediocre reruns on TV.

  • easier (Score:5, Funny)

    by cowscows (103644) on Tuesday December 11 2007, @02:05PM (#21660101) Journal
    Meh, I just married a librarian instead.
    • wife...? what is this 'wife' that you speak of

      • Re:easier (Score:5, Funny)

        by gstoddart (321705) on Tuesday December 11 2007, @04:04PM (#21662267) Homepage

        wife...? what is this 'wife' that you speak of

        Wife is a slightly different version of the same product as Girlfriend.

        It comes with some more restrictive licensing, and there's a little bit of vendor lock in, but some people don't object.

        Opinions seem to be mixed on if you should stick with Girlfriend, but it largely depends on your needs and long-term plans. Many people who add the add-on package Child 1.0 end up going this route, but it's not mandatory.

        It's got higher maintenance costs than Girlfriend, but has some features not found in that package as well, so it's a trade off.

        Sometimes upgrading a version of Girlfriend can have a steep learning curve, as they tend to randomly change features with each major version, so you should really determine if your current version of Girlfriend meets your needs before you upgrade.

        YMMV.

        Cheers

        • Re:easier (Score:5, Funny)

          by kryten_nl (863119) on Tuesday December 11 2007, @04:10PM (#21662367)
          Having both Wife and Girlfriend installed may cause serious problems. Although some people have reported long term success, there have been no definitive studies.

    • George Bush reads slashdot? It's a lie!

  • Library problem unsolved: Add kids (Score:3, Interesting)

    by EmbeddedJanitor (597831) on Tuesday December 11 2007, @02:10PM (#21660167)
    ...they'll scramble the system if it does not make sense to them.

    We have approx 3000 books in the house as well as two kids. Dewey-ish classification works fine for us, splitting the books into groups according to their Dewey hundreds (0-99.999, 100-1999.999,...). However we have had to break out some special sections. Robots, programming and electronics have a special area together (breaking Dewey boundaries). All the fishing related stuff goes together (including studies of aquatic instects etc). All the craft books go together (well Dewey does that anyway).

    No computer needed.

  • Organise? (Score:5, Funny)

    by sm62704 (957197) on Tuesday December 11 2007, @02:11PM (#21660187) Journal
    I have boxes of books in the basement, shelves of books upstairs, stacks of books in th edining room, CDs, DVDs, tapes, records, all over the place.

    I solved the problem by ignoring it.

    -mcgrew [slashdot.org]
  • The same company which currently sell the hand bar code scanner that was mentioned in the article, Microvision, appear to have software just for cataloging books, CDs, DVDs, and anything scannable with a bar code. It didn't state that it could do book organizing in LOC or Dewey Decimal system, but if someone is wanting to do a similar project, to inventory media, it may be something that people could look into.

  • You don't... (Score:3, Funny)

    by gillbates (106458) on Tuesday December 11 2007, @02:13PM (#21660219) Homepage Journal

    If the RIAA has their way, making available copyrighted works to people other than the purchaser will be considered copyright infringement. You don't want to get sued by the books publishers, do you?

    Then don't create a library. It's that simple.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by mi (197448)

          If the NY Times could figure out a system by which they'd know who is reading which copy of their newspaper, who is peeking over shoulders to read it and who hands it to someone else, they'd use that system to charge everyone who takes a look at their property. The only thing that's stopping them is that this is currently not feasible. The MPAA and RIAA are just lucky that their product migrated to digital format much sooner

          Uhm, well, yes. Is there anything wrong with it? You don't say, that there is, but

              • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                by tricorn (199664)

                What's fair about someone else having a say in how often I do something that doesn't affect them in the least? If they want to keep what they've done private, I have no problem with that. Once they release it into the wild, for whatever reason, they have lost control of it.

                Should the worker in the plate factory be able to tell you what you can or can't eat off of "his" plates?

                Ok, so you spend a day installing a beautiful new bathroom for me, and plan to recoup your time investment every time I use the t

  • I remember reading your original post and found it intriguing, great to see some feedback after it's all said and done. Anyways, I would love to see some pictures! I skimmed through your write up and found many of it interesting (I'll read it completely tonight) but I would love to see some images of your completed work. Maybe I missed a link or something though.
  • Now you can see an Ask Slashdot question with a definitive answer

    That takes all the fun out of it, especially for legal questions.

    Example:
    Q: Someone is taking credit for my code. What legal recourse do I have?

    A1: IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you can kill him for that and call it self defense. It totally won't be murder.
    A2: IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you can take his eye for it. Eye for a piece of code or something like that...
    A3: IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you're entitled to their wife and the profits from selling his children into slavery.
    A4: I AM a lawyer, and depending on how you licensed your code ... blah blah (bunch of legalese) blah... and that's what you are legally entitled to do.

    The experience of an ask slashdot is going down the list of answers, plugging and checking. Surviving long enough to use the one by the actual lawyer is so rewarding. I tell you, I want stand for any sort definitive answer to an ask slashdot.

  • Most importantly... (Score:4, Funny)

    by TBone (5692) on Tuesday December 11 2007, @02:16PM (#21660269) Homepage
    ...you didn't answer any questions about this "wife" artifact you're dealing with while catalogging books. Could you please give us more details?

  • Oh, painful memory (Score:5, Funny)

    by Deadstick (535032) on Tuesday December 11 2007, @02:16PM (#21660271)
    ...of my ex-daughter-in-law, who decided to surprise me for my birthday by reorganizing my (3500) books:

    By height.

    rj

  • I solved this problem. (Score:5, Funny)

    by DdJ (10790) on Tuesday December 11 2007, @02:19PM (#21660333) Homepage Journal
    My solution was "marry a librarian". Worked very well for me, you might consider trying it.
  • I stopped using dead-tree books years ago, first I used a Palm III and later I switched to a Sony Clie TH-55. A lot of people are skeptical about e-books, saying it is uncomfortable reading from a screen but my experience is that the exact opposite is true.

    The big advantages of reading e-books:
    • The choice in books is a lot bigger, I prefer reading english books, mostly sci-fi and fantasy. In the Netherlands where I live libraries have a very limited selection of english books and hardly any sci-fi/fantasy.
    • It

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by superwiz (655733)
      There are disadvantages, too though.
      • You don't have a proper appreciation of how much or how little you are reading. Some people might think it's a plus, but other people need to manage their time more carefully.
      • It's not as easy to take notes in e-books. So most books that require deep thought and pondering are out of the question.

    • Re:Dead tree format is dead (Score:4, Insightful)

      by JimDaGeek (983925) on Tuesday December 11 2007, @03:08PM (#21661237)
      Electronic books still suck. They are device dependent and most importantly, DRM-encrusted.

      A friend of mine can come over and borrow one of my ~1,500 real books.

      They cannot do that with an e-book. They cannot transfer one of my "e-books" to their reader. I guess publishers want everyone that reads a book to pay? Hmmm. Am I the only one that has ever borrowed a book?

      I personally was never into vampire books until my dad gave me a book of his to read. Guess what, since reading the one borrowed book, I bought about 12 vampire books.

      Lending books without restrictions creates more profit. End of story. My aunt is big on classic works, works in the public domain. After she lent me two books, I paid for copies of several books that I can download free since they are in the public domain.

      I am not trolling, e-books currently suck. The readers are crap, sorry kindle-fans, and the DRM/lock-down is not acceptable to avid readers. When an electronic book comes along that I can lend to a friend without it being tracked, then I might consider it. For now, I still want a physical book. I can lend out a physical book without some book company tracking it or putting a time limit on it.

  • Date a Librarian (Score:5, Funny)

    by Henry V .009 (518000) on Tuesday December 11 2007, @02:21PM (#21660357) Journal
    That's what I do. And her BS is in Computer Science, so win-win. Except for all the emacs versus vim arguments. Gah! So many years of schooling, and she can't understand that vim is superior?
  • I was facing a similar, but somewhat smaller problem (~1600 books) and worked out a solution using delicious monster. First off I segregated my hardcovers and paperbacks info fiction and non-fiction sections, then scanned them all into Delicious Library, a great mac app. It uses a video camera (I used a camcorder with firewire, but you can use a webcam) to scan the barcode, then gets the info on the book from amazon. Obviously the scanning is the most tedious bit, but since I had to remove everything from t
  • Burn them to a DVD.

    Next.

    Seriously I haven't read a paper book cover to cover since I was 17 or so (10 years ago). Have read many multi-hundred page PDFs though.

  • Why is this tagged richbastard? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by evanbd (210358) on Tuesday December 11 2007, @02:25PM (#21660455)

    Seriously, what the hell?

    Doesn't everyone here have a hobby or two they spend a fair bit of money on? Perhaps it's your computer gear, maybe it's model airplanes, maybe it's your car or your audio system. Last I checked, an awful lot of geeks had a particular hobby they enjoyed and spent money on, and they don't have to be 'rich bastards' to do so. They just have to value enjoying themselves over... What? Hording money? So this man's hobby is reading and his library, and he enjoys organizing it in a creative way.

    Sheesh.

    • To elaborate on the parent comment, they probably haven't spent all that much anyway, especially if they've been collecting books for more than 20 years; even if each book costs about $10 in today's dollars, that's about $1750 per year over 20 years, or about $875 per person per year. The yearly average could be a lot less, depending on how long they've been buying and keeping books, whether they habitually shop used, receive books/bookstore certificates as gifts, steal from the library or friends*, or what
  • Hi, it was an overall interesting reading with some entertaining bits. I realized that you settled for a closed source sollution for this one. I am sure there must be some Open Source software which you could use to solve your problem (one of the many along Open Bibliographic and cataloging list [sourceforge.net].

    In your article you state that you thought about developing your own application. I think that a better approach would be to look for the Open Source applications that satisfy you AND after choosing one, add the too

  • Not a rich bastard (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bogjobber (880402) on Tuesday December 11 2007, @02:30PM (#21660543)

    Someone tagged this rich bastard, but I don't think that's extreme at all. I've kept nearly every book I've ever bought in my life, and I probably have around 800. And I'm only 21 years old (thankfully my parents have an empty garage and I was reading from age 2). Depending on the submitter's age and if he/she is married to another book lover it would be very easy to get to that number.

    This is slashdot, right? As in news for nerds. Do nerds no longer enjoy reading?

  • Our system (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tool462 (677306) on Tuesday December 11 2007, @02:35PM (#21660641)
    We are only around 500-600 books right now, so admittedly it's a smaller issue than 3500, but Delicious Library software combined with what the submitter calls "soft alphabetizing" has worked well for us. We split fiction from non-fiction, then split non-fiction into sub categories. My wife and I each have a handful of categories that we are very interested in, so a dozen sub-categories combined with a general non-fiction catch-all makes most books easy to find. In fact, the only reason we use the software catalog is so we can loan out books to friends and family. What's the point of keeping hundreds or thousands of books, if they go unused? People are always borrowing books (and movies) and we don't have to worry about losing them. Or at least we know whose thumbs to break if the books don't come back.

  • Thank you! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fr05t (69968) on Tuesday December 11 2007, @02:45PM (#21660809)
    It's nice to see someone actually follow up on an Ask Slashdot question and share the end result.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TBone (5692)
      Except he excluded DDS explicitly, because it was difficult to subcategorize-and-sort below the general ABC.XYZ Dewey number.
    • I'd try reading their article(wasn't slashdotted for me); they specifically address that they considered the Dewey Decimal System and point out the problems they had with it.

      Of course, I have enough books to practically count as another 4" of insulation around my house...

      • I find the secret is to lay them spine-down in the attic. Helps immeasurably with heating and cooling costs.

        • " I find the secret is to lay them spine-down in the attic. Helps immeasurably with heating and cooling costs."

          ... and don't forget to apply for a carbon tax credit for all the carbon sequestered in those dead trees!

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rk (6314)

      There's more to cataloging books than just finding them. We've probably got only a couple thousand, but my wife catalogs them using LibraryThing [librarything.com] and also stores them in a local file. To my knowledge, we've never used either to find a book in our house, but these things give us:

      • An easy way when we're out to see if we already own a copy of a book. LibraryThing has a mobile interface that makes checking with a cell phone easy.
      • A document for the insurance man if we ever get hit by a fire or other disaster (

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by sootman (158191)
      I have quite a few books myself and I'm contemplating doing exactly this (except for about 50 books that are rare, super-expensive or used often).

      As long as we're making value judgments for strangers, here's my suggestion for you: why don't you sell those last 50 books of yours and give the money to the homeless? If they're valuable, they're worth a lot! If they're rare, then those are the ones that it's most important that you not hoard, right? </smart-assery>

      No one has the right to tell someone else

    • Re:Why do you _need_ 3500 books? (Score:4, Informative)

      by shalla (642644) on Tuesday December 11 2007, @05:00PM (#21663255)
      Why not donate, say, 3400 of them that you will never read again to a local public library? I have quite a few books myself and I'm contemplating doing exactly this (except for about 50 books that are rare, super-expensive or used often).

      And as a public librarian, I strongly suggest that you ASK your librarian before you do this. If you show up at my library with that number of books, I will probably attempt to make you eat them.

      Here's a previous Slashdot comment I made regarding how different public libraries handle donations differently and how they may be either a boon or a burden [slashdot.org], depending on the library.

      Finally, if he enjoys having 3500 books and his family and friends use them, why shouldn't he have them?

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