Initial Catalog Advice

Brand new to LT and TinyCat.

I have about 3000 books that I want to catalog.

My desire is to barcode all the books for my inventory. I hope to use existing ISBN barcodes for books that have them, and print my own barcodes for books that don't (about half).*

Any advice from people on the smoothest way to do this? (Use computer or app? Buy barcode scanner? Assign barcodes as I go, or catalog first and barcode second? Etc.) There's got to be a lot of people here who have done a full catalog run themselves, what have you learned that I can draw on before I jump in? Thanks!!!

*I know LT sells pre-printed barcodes, but I intend to do some type of custom cross between a barcode and call number all on one label (any bright ideas on that are welcomed as well!).

First piece of advice: use library sources, NOT Amazon for those older books without ISBNs. The best place to start is Overcat. Work in small batches and check each entry if you want a really accurate catalogue. (Don't be afraid of manual entry. It's faster than editing a bad import.)

Mark each book as you enter it. I used blue sticker dots inside the front cover. If I were going to assign bar codes anyway, I would assign barcodes to every book on entry, including new ones for books that have existing barcodes.

>1 Scarponi: I've been pleased with this barcode scanner for a whopping $6, if you're in the US: https://www.amazon.com/TaoTronics-Handheld-Computer-Inventory-Management/dp/B07M...

I've used it with my desktop computer, and with my smartphone around the house via a USB On-The-Go adapter (note that not all smartphones support USB OTG) for another $5.

Oh, and if any of your books might have vendor stickers still partially or fully covering up their original barcodes, you'll want to spend some time cleaning those off a bunch of books before trying to scan that batch; it slows the process down when you run into one in the middle of scanning.

>2 MarthaJeanne: I think you mean Overcat, right?

>2 MarthaJeanne: >4 lesmel: Got to be Overcat, not OverDrive.

I personally dislike using Overcat and have had to make fewer edits relying on Amazon for older works. Experiment with different sources to see what is better for you. I do advise against relying Bowker and the Library of Congress, though. I've spent too many hours correcting messes from those sources, and lately, we're more likely to receive errors in the search results.

By the way, bad data comes in from everywhere, so plan for corrections.

Deciding how you want to use categories and tags (if at all) before entering most of your books will save time. LibraryThing has a power edit feature, but it's unreliable. Members (including myself) have lost data from Power Edit responding in unexpected ways. Selecting the categories and adding tags as you enter your books will likely cause less frustration and save time over trying to do mass edits with that tool.

For creating batches, I suggest separating out books with and without barcodes for entry, possibly as you scan. In my experience, trying to enter both types at the same time was irritating. I would also separate out the barcodeless books with ISBNs marked in your copies from the books without (apparent) ISBNs for the same reason.

The app handles barcodes well. A scanner is a good alternative. For typing in ISBNs or creating manual entries, the desktop site is easier than the app.

I hope this helps. Of course, you're welcome to ignore advice that doesn't feel as if it's best for you.

It’s a long time since I did it, but a few thoughts:
- Work in manageable batches (e.g. a shelf at a time) and check your data as you go along.
- Splitting your books into piles of old and new (with/without barcode; with/without ISBN) only makes sense if you don’t need to preserve the current order on the shelf, but it would speed things up.
- Decide early on whether you care about covers in your catalogue or not; if you do, verify these as you go as well. If you’ve got the pile of books at your desk anyway, it’s a simple additional step to put the ones without an existing LT cover on the desktop scanner or snap them with your smartphone in the app. Quicker than chasing them afterwards.
- Ergonomically I found it easiest to take a pile of books to my desk rather than try to work sitting on the floor by the shelves with a laptop, but that depends on your layout at home, of course. A trolley or folding table might be another solution.
- Thermal label-printers aren’t very expensive, and being able to print labels one at a time is likely to be a lot easier than printing whole sheets on a standard desktop printer.
- Pre-ISBN books tend to be the biggest challenge, but mass-market paperback editions where there’s no good library data can sometimes be surprisingly difficult: often you have to use Amazon and correct half the fields manually.
- For non-English books it can take a bit of trial and error to find the most reliable data source from the long list available.
- Allow extra time for getting distracted by books you didn’t know you had, books you borrowed but failed to return, books clearly in the wrong place, dust, books that need repair, weird things that have somehow got into books or behind the books on the shelf...

>7 thorold: As in 'so that's where that got to...'

Or in my case, random entry tickets from holiday trips being used as bookmarks and left in the back (or front) of the book, or a book that somehow got inside another book. The latter happened earlier this year when we were clearing out the library to use as a home office during lock-down.

Definitely think about what information is important to you, and what rabbit holes you're going to pass by (look at the different style options for the list of available fields....). Think about tag structure if you're going to use them, and collections. It's much easier to assign these to books as you add them, then it is to go back and change how you want to organise the whole thing.

>2 MarthaJeanne: "If I were going to assign bar codes anyway, I would assign barcodes to every book on entry, including new ones for books that have existing barcodes."

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if using 2 barcodes systems (existing and new) is just asking for a headache later. It just seems like a waste to not use existing barcodes printed on the books.

>3 Opteryx: Wow $6 is great! Can you tell me more about how the USB OTG works, and if you have any recommended ones for purchase?

>6 aspirit: "Deciding how you want to use categories and tags (if at all) before entering most of your books will save time."
>9 reading_fox: "Think about tag structure if you're going to use them, and collections. It's much easier to assign these to books as you add them, then it is to go back and change how you want to organise the whole thing."

This is maybe one of the places I could use more advice! What are the best use for tags/categories? Or maybe I should just ask, what are the different ways people have used them? What mistakes have you made with them that you would have done differently?

>11 Scarponi: If your smartphone supports it, you should be able to find it in the phone specs that get posted in various places online. You plug the right adapter into your phone's USB port (mine is a USB-C, but I think some micro-USB phones support OTG too), and it gives you a normal desktop-style USB port on the other end of it to plug just about any USB device in - keyboards and USB thumbdrives are other common uses.

This is the adapters I bought - it's actually $4 for 2 of them: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08CHJRPWH/

There are plenty of Bluetooth wireless barcode scanners out there too, but those were all quite a bit more expensive than this combo, and I didn't want another battery in my life to keep up with. And of course many people just use the phone camera, but I like how much faster and easier to focus a real barcode scanner is, even in dim lighting.

Personally I actually haven't been doing the adding directly from barcodes in the LT phone app when I use this setup; instead, I scan into a Google Docs spreadsheet where I can add some quick notes next to some of the barcodes, and then I do the real adding back at my desktop so I can be more particular about which records to use and do more editing. But it works fine to add right in the app if you prefer.

>13 Opteryx: I scan into a Google Docs spreadsheet where I can add some quick notes next to some of the barcodes, and then I do the real adding back at my desktop

That sounds like a good idea! Scanning with the app is great for small numbers of recent acquisitions, but it gets very hard to keep track of the successes and failures if you are processing a big pile of books. And presumably you can also type in ISBNs manually in your spreadsheet for books with ISBN but no barcode, without having to interrupt the process.

When I was scanning earlier this year, I used the barcode scanner on the LT app, and then edited the record as I went along. We did one shelf/author at a time; I had 'Your books' open in list view with the inventory buttons and basically took the inventory for each author in turn. Books not in inventory got scanned, the page was refreshed, and the newly added book records got tidied up and covers scanned if necessary.

The trick is to do it in manageable batches. Mind you, there were 2 of us - Paul did the lugging around and re-shelved as I worked on the records. It took 2 or 3 weekends working most of the day.

We'd combined print libraries when we moved in together (5 years ago now!), and although we'd culled the duplicates, there were a few hundred of Paul's books to log. We got around to it early in lockdown as we needed to clear off tables for desk space (and large monitor space).

>12 Scarponi: - Tags and collections are great for finding books in your library. You can only filter by one collection at a time (I think). Wheras you can multi-search tags. So I use a few broad categories for collections - Read, Wishlist, ebook, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Crime etc. Then I try to be as comprehensive as I can in tagging.

I like to display my books in series order in LT which requires a careful tag order: I use an author code followed by the series code, followed by everything else:

~,!Author, /Series01, etc

The ! and / sort to the front of the tag page so I don't have to look at them, ~sorts to the end and I use it as a separator between fiction and non-fiction. They were searchable but there have been some changes so you might need to check which works best. I'm not currently inclined to re-edit all the books.
Viewing catalogue sorted by tags then has everything nicely together.

There are many other ways to use tags and collections! If you forget you can poweredit tags and collections in sets of 100 books, but altering the order is still very very tedious.

>16 reading_fox: You can easily filter by two collections or by the books not in a collection.

Profile> Stats/Memes> Collections at the bottom of the left hand menu.

Mine is here: https://www.librarything.com/profile/MarthaJeanne/stats/collections

I find this page very useful.

>14 thorold: Yes, and I type in title/author/year in the spreadsheet if it's an item with no ISBN/UPC at all. :) (As I add things from the basic spreadsheet into LT later, I delete those rows from it, it's not anything detailed.) And for things I want to keep track of the location of, I add a bold label on a dividing row when I start a different room/shelf/box/etc.

>16 reading_fox: I've been using some punctuation prefixes on some of my tags like that, and I've found that for optimum searchability, having a space between the punctuation and any words in the tag works best. So instead of "/Series", I'd use "/ Series", etc. That way you don't have to remember to include the "/" when searching, as you must when there's no space.

>1 Scarponi: I once scanned in about 9,000 books for our bilingual club library (@HollandseClub) which had been in existence for years already so the collections were already set up (fiction by age/ non-fiction etc). I started off by typing in ISBN numbers - which took forever. Getting the barcode CAT scanner sped things up a lot but the fastest, for me, was when the app came out. I got one of my kids to set their phone to the correct collection and then pull each book out just enough to scan the barcode and then push it back in while I sat at the desk and edited the books on the computer. I think we went from about 10 books a day to about 50-100 (or for however long my kids could concentrate during my library shift). This method also meant I didn't have piles of books lying around the library, just the ones with troublesome ISBNs.

Because they were library books, the price tags had already been removed. I find that now, many shop barcodes will give you the correct book when scanned - but sometimes they don't. But sometimes publishers print the ISBN barcodes on the inside of the cover as well.

Of course, if you're worried about covers, you'd have to go back and do those afterwards. I'm going through my personal collection right now (about 700 books) and scanning in my own covers, adding my own call numbers (I've just discovered that there's a column for that in 'Settings'), adding cover artists' names etc. all of which I find strangely enjoyable.

Hi! Noticing a bunch of these messages are about 6 years old and the aforementioned scanner is no longer available. does anyone have any recommendations on isbns's and scanners. My needs are two part. I manage a small private school library, so need something to meet the needs of the books that don't have isbns and I also need a way to give the kids a barcode for faster check out. Personally, I am working through my life long collection of journals and would like to catalog them. Would like barcodes that would work for my purposes there. thank you in advance!

A scanner will not help with books without ISBNs.

>20 StorytellersLibrary: , it sounds as if you are working in a library environment.

Home library users often use the iOS or Android app (free) for adding books via ISBN-13 barcodes on the books. If the barcode is a retail UPC barcode (does not begin with 978) then that would be an issue.

Thinking of the original question from 6 years ago, a mixture of ISBN and custom barcodes may not be feasible. If you have two books with the same ISBN, how can you tell one from the other for purposes of inventory and check-out? This is why it is probably best to use some non-repeating barcodes such as the ones LT has offered. Perhaps they still do.

I believe I read that their TinyCat system has some check out function and this might be worth looking into. There are discussion forums for this purpose.

James

>20 StorytellersLibrary: It's been a few years but when I bought the CAT scanner from LibraryThing, I got some printed barcode stickers as well. I assume they still do those.

For scanning barcodes at home I use the LT app (as in >22 Keeline:)

>23 humouress: Yes, you can still get barcode labels that work with the CueCat scanner here: https://www.librarything.com/more/store/barcodes