Several people have asked about the cataloguing process, so here is a quick overview of the workflow we used to do quick cataloguing of the books with barcodes. A more detailed guide and workshops on this are planned for the future. Drop us a message if you would like more info on this.
Tools:
- Barcode scanner: Binary Eye (Android) other barcode scanners are available. I chose this one because it has no ads or spyware and saves a history of scans that can be exported as a text file
- Any plain text editor: For tidying up any incomplete or duplicate barcodes scans
- Bibliographic software: Zotero is open source, has the option ofr a publically shared online library and allows exporting into any other standard format such as CSV or formats that libraries can use directly in their databases.
- Scanning software for non-barcoded items
Workflow:
- Scan the barcodes of books box by box using Binary Eye (tip: you can create manual barcodes for location IDs to separate out groups of scans)
- Take visual scans of items in a box with no barcodes.
- Export the scanned ISBN barcodes to a text file for back-up (tip: don’t clear history and referring back to timestamps mght be useful for clarifying which group a code belongs to)
- Select a block of line separated barcodes
- Bulk import to Zotero using Add by Identifier feature (tip: bulk adding of items works better in the Zotero standalone app, in the web interface it is safer to add items one at a time to detect errors)
Not all books have barcodes. ISBNs can be manually typed into Zotero using the same feature. We have included scanned PDFs attached to the folder for each box in the catalogue of ISBNs that need to be manually added. Some older books have non standard numbers or no ISBNs at all – so there are scans of the covers and colophons for those, which will be added to the catalogue manually when someone has time.
Hope this helps if you have an interesting or unusual professional library and would like to catalogue it yourself to share with others!