My fishing book register needed an update – and the registration of a lot of books
I have quite a few fishing books – more than 500 – and have had most of them registered in a small digital system for a long time.
I use this system to keep track of what I have, because even though the books are right behind me, fairly ordered by author and title, I sometimes have a hard time finding a book that I know that I have ... or sometimes don’t have, but thought I had, and keep looking for it in vain.
Having it in a system on the computer makes it easier to find the single book, and since the books are tagged with subjects, and authors are registered, I can usually turn around and pick it out of the shelf when I have located it in the register.
I have written about My book register before, and the system that ran until a few days ago is essentially the same as covered in the blog post from 2019, and the same as when it started.
15 years
This register has existed for almost 15 years, and has run unchanged since its inauguration, which means that it was running on old technology. And old technology tends to break for some reason. It’s like old cars and old fishing gear: newer and better models appear, and even though there’s no wear and tear on digital systems, the surrounding systems move and get upgraded, and at a certain point, things tend to break.
In this case the problem was that I couldn’t upload the cover images to the server anymore. I have experienced this before with similar systems on other sites, and the way out has been to upgrade to the latest and greatest version – like I did with this whole site a little less than a year ago.
So it was down the trodden path: download all the content to my local system, convert it to the new version and upload it again. This wasn’t a trivial job, but I have done it many times now, and know what to do and how to handle it. It took a day’s work, and the new system was up-and-running on my development server. Uploading it to the online-ditto was a long-winding task that took all night. These modern publishing systems are sooo complex now, and this one is more than 40,000 files in its latest incarnation. Even on a fast Internet-connection, that takes a while to transfer to a server somewhere online.
A reminder
Handling and converting all the registered books reminded me that I have a lot of books that aren’t in the system yet. I usually register new books when I get them, but sometimes I can’t find the time to do it, and sometimes I get more books than I can muster to register in one go.
Like when my good friend Kim was here with a ton of books some years back. Many of still aren't in the system, so I took the opportunity to get some of them entered.
The process is quite tedious, actually, but can be aided by a certain degree of automation. I have a function in the system, which can search for books based on their ISBN, and create the stub for a record in the system from the information found in a search in Open Library, which has a very extensive archive of a lot of books.
Luckily they also have an interface, which allows developers like me to plug into their system and draw out data.
With this in hand, I could make a form that takes an ISBN, returns the data (if the book is found) and offers to create a new book based on the information.
This eases the task significantly, but of course only helps when the book is found. And a lot of the older books and the Danish ones are not in Open Library, and then it’s a question of manually typing in the title, author and so on.
I also add images of all book covers, and that means scanning or photographing every single book. Sometimes there’s something extra to document, like a dedication in the book, or a fly, a card or whatnot that came with the book.
Worth the effort
But the result is worth the effort, because I eventually get a complete register of all my books, with title, subtitle, author name(s), subjects and a visual identification in the form of a cover. I also register physical info like page count and binding.
This helps me tremendously when I want to locate a book, and has been worth all the work I have put into it over the years.
Now it’s new and upgraded and ready to receive more books, and I have started going through the pile of unregistered books. The count in the database is now 493 books, and I’m sure it will reach 500 and more before this weekend is over (as you can see from the images, the count is now 504 books, and I probably have 20 or 30 more books that aren't registered yet).
The great reshuffle
But ... and there’s a huge but here. When all the books are in the system, the physical world will need to reflect the digital one, and all books must be placed in order by author and title. And that’s some task, because since I moved to my new office, the number of books has grown significantly, and there isn’t space for them all in the shelves. They are so tightly packed that new books rest horizontally on the top of the books they need to be between, and that’s not a viable way of storing books!
So I need to take out all books, sort them and add the new ones and replace them into the shelves in such a way that there’s room for even more new acquisitions.
That job will be done at a later point in time, because right now, just getting them into the digital register is more than enough work.
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