Bruji

I'm helping my folks organize their library. They have about 3,000 books or so, spread out over about 100 shelves. Getting the books scanned into Bookpedia would be nice, but it would be even better to have a shelf number associated with each book.

In a perfect world, I'd see myself either scanning a shelf tag, then scanning all of the books on a shelf, or scanning a book, then the shelf tag.

I could easily generate a CSV file as follows:

ISBN,SHELF
1234566777,A1
1234556979,D3

&c.

What would be the fastest way to add hundreds of books, with the stipulation that adding the location must be easy? I'm fairly Perl-savvy, and it looks like the barcode scanner I got is SUPER customizable.

Any ideas?

There are two ideas that come to mind. One is to scan the books directly into Bookpedia, with the preference set to add the first result. This way you can scan book without touching the keyboard. Once your done with a shelf you select all the books that have been scanned for one shelf and edit them to set the shelf for all of them. Of course you have to keep the books scanned together to make them ease to select, do this by sorting the date added or by creating a collection for each shelf prior to scanning.

Second option is to create the CSV file then simply import the file and map the ISBN to ISBN and shelf to location. After import use the get more info command under the advance menu to gather the book information.

I say try them both with one shelf and see what workflow you prefer.