1bkramar
My mother has a LibraryThing catalog with just over 2500 books in it. We built it together over many years. I had to do a lot of manual fixing. Several books were old and had to be added completely from scratch. Some had no ISBNs. In addition, I added a lot of personal tags (mostly regarding locations) and some personal comments. I want to export this catalog from her account and import into my own personal library since I will be inheriting most of her books. In the ideal world, I would export in the correct format from her account, then import into mine with every editable field included but particularly: "date added", "personal comments", "secondary authors (and types)", "tags", custom covers (I photographed and added a lot of those)
I want to be sure I understand my options because I've already had the import "not behave as expected" a couple of times.
If I understand correctly:
- The Universal Import will strip out duplicate ISBNs, and add information purely from the web, along with my tags and date read but won't include personal comments or the date originally added to the library. I'm concerned about stripping out duplicate ISBN's since my mom had multiple copies of many books which are tagged differently since they were stored in different locations. I'm wondering if the stripping out of duplicates is why the imported books were about 100 fewer than the exported books the first time I tried. It also failed to import 7 specific ISBNs which were listed on the import page.
- CSV is limited only to the columns in the sample so I don't see that as adding anything useful? Am I missing anything important about this option over the first?
- MARC doesn't map to tags so that option is out for me.
Any advice on how to replicate this library with a minimum of manual work? And if there IS going to need to be manual work to sort out which ISBNs are missing, etc, does anyone have tips on how to do this efficiently?
Thank you!
Brenda
I want to be sure I understand my options because I've already had the import "not behave as expected" a couple of times.
If I understand correctly:
- The Universal Import will strip out duplicate ISBNs, and add information purely from the web, along with my tags and date read but won't include personal comments or the date originally added to the library. I'm concerned about stripping out duplicate ISBN's since my mom had multiple copies of many books which are tagged differently since they were stored in different locations. I'm wondering if the stripping out of duplicates is why the imported books were about 100 fewer than the exported books the first time I tried. It also failed to import 7 specific ISBNs which were listed on the import page.
- CSV is limited only to the columns in the sample so I don't see that as adding anything useful? Am I missing anything important about this option over the first?
- MARC doesn't map to tags so that option is out for me.
Any advice on how to replicate this library with a minimum of manual work? And if there IS going to need to be manual work to sort out which ISBNs are missing, etc, does anyone have tips on how to do this efficiently?
Thank you!
Brenda
