Can we print catalog cards?

I'm working with a local group of volunteers who are collecting and buying new and gently used books to donate to a K-12 school on an Indian reservation in S.D. (a one-time project, not ongoing). To know what's already been purchased to avoid duplication, I suggested cataloging them on LibraryThing. The school library is still using catalog cards and we want to avoid overloading the small staff with tons of cataloging work when we deliver the books--and to make the books shelf-ready if possible. Is there a way to format the LibraryThing holdings to mimic a catalog card so I could print it on card stock for the cards to accompany the books?

You know, I've wanted to print out cards for library for a long time. But I looked at the cost of it. Very high. Have you done the math on that? I don't think the answer is printing it yourself to card stock, though.

With the card stock idea, you can still use LibraryThing - an export of your catalog to Excel, paring down to the right fields for your cards and a quick mail merge into a Word template that you set up to mimic a library card and voila (4-6 cards per sheet). This is assuming you have someone with the skills in Office to do this...because it's not exactly a beginner task.

It would be similar to setting up an Excel to Word label mail merge:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HP052037601033.aspx

Although the sheer cost of the card stock and ink...I shudder to think.

Well, I think you could do it in Excel. Ideally we'd have Excel templates for it, prepared for various stock. Or we'd generate PDFs.

When I was a working librarian, I usually got my cardstock and other materials from The Library Store. Good prices and free shipping.

Assuming standard 7.5 x 12.25cm cards at 4 per A4 sheet
1000 sheets of A4 card 37UKP Laser printed at a penny per sheet would by 47UKP for 4000 books. (Card price 280mic -20gsm from Ebay, am sure that could be sourced a lot cheaper)
So approx $70 or 1.75 cents per card/book. Double that for both an author and title catalogue.

I suspect the largest amount of work would be in cutting the cards down to size, a friendly local printer could accomplish this in minutes and at low cost (and may be persuaded to donate the time to a good cause).

Re. #5: Ideally we'd have Excel templates for it ... Or we'd generate PDFs.

Admittedly, the development and maintenance of this would be a bit of a P.I.T.A., but it would be a great FEATURE for the site ... especially if users could d/l their info directly to a template!

 

I am working on a similar project, but can find no way to get a list of authors and titles into Excel to than transfer to cards or labels to put on cards. Can anyone tell me how to do this?

Use the Export feature on the More tab; export to tab-delimited format (it includes more fields) then edit your spreadsheet to taste.

This sounds great, but I have not been able to save my catalog to my computer so that I could put it into Excel. Can anyone explain how to save catalog to computer for Excel? For now, I have only about 800 books to make cards for. The only other way would be to write out all of these. It would not take long for my handwriting to be come illegible.

Sorry, I wrote before I got your speedy reply. I am going to try and do this now. Thanks so much.

Go to the More tab, at the top of the page in LT.

Under Features, the third item is Import/Export.

Look under Export from LibraryThing.

The second item is Export as Tab-delimited Text. This takes a minute or two to complete.

Look in your Downloads folder or My Documents folder, or wherever your computer puts downloaded files, for a file named "LibraryThing_TD.xls.tsv" and use Excel to open it.

Edit as desired, and save as an .xls file.

I could not find the More tab, but somehow I have managed to get an Excel title-author page. If I can put together a set of directions, I will post them this week. Thank you to those that helped me. I was getting discouraged.

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