New Member and Question

Hi,

Newbie here coming from Readerware.

What field do folks here use for a books location. I may have overlooked it but do have not seen any field that seems to mean location.

Context: I have books in multiple rooms and in some rooms there are multiple bookshelves. Each location has a short name based on the room, the bookcase and the shelf.

This location name is in the info that I would like to import but it is not clear to label it in the csv file.

Thanks for your help.

You have many options depending on what you want to do with that piece of data.

I use tags - makes it very easy to pull a list of what is in a box/bookcase.

There is also the Custom Classification number - if you don’t use it for your own cataloging number of some type, you can use it for that. Or you can use comments. :)

PS: You cannot add columns to the csv for the universal import - the file needs to look exactly as the example.

>1 sporg: Welcome newbie! I was a newbie myself just back in August of last year. LibraryThing is the most powerful of all the book sites, if you ask me. I'm a very happy camper here.

Like AnnieMod suggested, I use tags for that. I know when I came from Goodreads I had the Goodread "shelves" that indicated location. Those imported fine as part of the import. It asked me and I said I wanted those shelves to come over as tags.

Here's a LibraryThing trick you can think about doing once you get your library imported. I couldn't do this on Goodreads.

I use "zz" as my personal prefix for location (it could be anything, that was just my choice). The rest of the tag is the location. "zzwhite1" for example is my white bookshelf, top shelf.

I can search tags in "Your Books" with the addition of the wildcard character, the asterisk. In that search box I set it to search "tags" (not authors/titles, etc.) and then enter
zz*
that gives me me all the books that I have set a physical location for. There are 779 of them. Yay me.

Even handier is the same wildcard search for books that I have NOT set a physical location for (that is, I got lazy entering them, or just forgot). That search is
NOT zz*
and voila, I know which books I need to update with their location. Uh oh, there are 36. Time to do a little hunting.

>1 sporg: Welcome!

What field do folks here use for a books location

I use the Collections field for that. Mostly my Collections field indicates the label on the partial-shelf or group of shelves in which the book can be found, e.g. "History - WWII" and "Genealogy". Sometimes it (also) indicates the ID of the box the work is temporarily stored in—there's some heavy-duty reorg and bookcase-replacement going on here! In a couple cases my Collections field indicates the label we'd use on the shelf if we ever kept these books shelved (e.g. "Hymnals" and "Bibles" reside in multiple places around the house).

Other Call Number is the field designed for this. although people use lots of other ways to set it.

I don't think itvwas ever added to the imports.

I'll add that if you're going to use TinyCat, I'd use Other Call Number field because you can than display it as your chosen location data field.

>2 AnnieMod: Thank you!

Tags look like the way to go.

One more question:
Since we can't add columns to the csv for the universal import how can we import data fields that are not in the example file?

>3 DebiCates: A lot of people use @ as a tag prefix for locations. It sorts to the end and since it means "at" it makes sense.

>4 LeslieWx: Thanks for the response!

Using collections is an interesting idea but might not work that well for my organization which is mostly, but not all, alphabetical by author.

>3 DebiCates: Thanks for the response.

I like that idea and will definitely use something like ZZ or @.

>8 jjwilson61: I am always a tad leery of using special characters but that's cool to know it works for others, thanks Jeff. I may convert my system to that sometime.