How can we inventory/catalog a large library in Guatemala

I am a missionary to Guatemala. I am working with a public library of 20,000 books in Panajachel on Lake Atitlan. They have a staff of 4. They used a commercial inventory and database management system until 2 years ago when the government stopped paying for the service. They lost the service and all records. I just built a MS Access database management system so they can reinventory their books and members. But, 20,000 books? Also, someone "helped" them by destroying all the bar codes on their books as being "unnecessary". So, any ideas, (aside from 6 of us who are in our 70s devoting every waking hour for the rest of our lives to hand entry)? This is one of the best libraries in Guatemala and the service they provide through children's programs, adult education, school assistance and good old fashioned love of books is amazing. We're desperate. We need ideas, even stupid crazy ones. Thanks

Yipes. That's a terrible story!

LibraryThing can certainly handle 20,000 books. It's not crazy at all. LibraryThing is the right solution for you, NOT MS Access! For starters, LibraryThing allows real MARC cataloging. This means you can create good records, and if you ever get big money again, you can export your records and import them into an expensive system. (Speaking of which, what was your system? Are you sure no MARC records survive?)

What you really want, however, is to catalog the books on LibraryThing and then use TinyCat to show them in a traditional catalog interface. See https://www.librarycat.org

20,000 is at the posted outer limit of what LibraryThing/TinyCat can handle. (The limitation is legal, not technical--LibraryThing is currently under agreement not to compete with ProQuest's library-management software.) But we have some wiggle room, and, in a case like this, where you're scarcely going to come into tens of thousands of dollars for Summon or Primo, they'll readily agree to going higher.

Anyway, I think it's a good choice for you. Can you email tinycat@librarything.com. We can talk it over there.

For what it's worth, when I started entering my books here, I had a month when I entered over 600 books. You will probably find that Spanish language books are less well covered by the sources than English, but even so, once you have decided how you want to organize your collection, it should take months rather than years.

BTW older Amazon.com entries tend to be really bad, and need lots of clean up. This will probably be even worse for books in Spanish. There seem to be a number of Latin American library sources.

"Even stupid crazy ideas" ? How about a digital camera and getting help from a crowd of LT'members? I.e. catalog the books quickly with titles as b00001, b00002, ... take a picture of the cover, call it b00001.jpg, upload the cover to LT (which will only display as a rather small image), also upload the cover to dropbox, so the catalogue helpers can get more details. Maybe more pictures of the first couple of pages to get edition, publication year etc?
Barcode them with the same numbers.

The catalogue helpers can then replace title, author, ....
(All this based on the idea that almost none of the titles can be found easily from isbn).

Someone with a talent for scripting, a couple of digital cameras and someone with a talent for quality assurance would come in handy.

>4 bnielsen: I'm willing to help. I like your idea but being the electronic Luddite I don't know a thing about scripting. I can certainly help with entry from a picture (I do know how dropbox works - one of the most wonderful inventions!) and/or QA work.

One aside; I personally would not try to enter too many fields in each record until you clearly understand how you are going to use it. Get the basics and then if another field is needed later enter the data then. I'm guessing the primary needs are author, title, subject (in a tag field?) and its location in the library.

You get the idea. . . don't overkill the detail or you will never get the job completed. . . just my "opinionated opinion".

>1 Willobeth: I'll be glad to cover the cost of joining LT, TinyCat, etc.

>5 ulmannc: I mentioned scripting only because renaming say 20000 digital photos to match 20000 barcodes could take a lot of time if done manually.

I have to say, flash-mob cataloging a library in Guatemala by pictures alone would be pretty damn amazing.

If you are going to flashmob catalog via pictures, the title page is a better source of info...though it would take longer to get the photos.

>9 lesmel: I was thinking something along these lines:
Someone prints barcodes 000001 and is in charge of labelling the books
Someone adds the books to LT with just the slimmest of descriptions (Maybe this can be automated?) i.e. titles like B000001 and no author - Barcode info would be nice to have here too)
Someone photographs the covers (Exactly one picture pr cover). The camera will probably call them P1440042.JPG, P1440043.JPG .... or similar)
Someone photographs the titlepage and maybe an extra page? The camera will probably call them P2440001.JPG, P2440002.JPG ...)
Someone renames the P1440042.JPG, P1440043.JPG ... to B000001.jpg, B00002.jpg ....
Someone renames the extra photos to E000001-a.jpg, E000001-b.jpg, E000002-a.jpg ...

Someone uploads the whole mass (mass, not mess) of pictures to a shared dropbox or similar

The crowd picks any books with titles like B000047 takes a look at B000047.jpg and E000047-a.jpg and E000047-b.jpg and catalogue the books solely based on the information in the pictures.

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Might actually be feasible, I think.

If someone can script the second step, the Guatemala crew need only decide on the order in which to process the books and handle each book once:
remove it from shelf, photograph the cover, photograph the title page, photograph anything special, barcode the book, replace it on shelf.

I recommend a test run or two :-)

Copyright page would be useful. ISBN for one thing.

I'm assuming the books are mostly in Spanish?

>11 MarthaJeanne: I was thinking that most of the books were without ISBN, but yes adding ISBN If present, would certainly be a help, so that's another photo.

Given enough flash-mob cataloguers, how fast could this be done? I'm thinking a minute to add the physical barcode would be the bottleneck?
But that could be done in parallel with only the person deciding "this barcode goes with this book" being dangerous to double.
Given enough people you could do something like this:

Fetch books from shelves in predefined order, keep the sequence, but make fetching fast. (Bucket-chain like). Present each book to ONE person, who
takes the next physical barcode and hands it to someone who puts the barcode on the book (this may take a lot longer, so we need many of these).
The barcoded book is then presented to a person who is responsible for keeping the sequence intact. This person hands the next book to the cover photographer
who takes one photo of the cover and hands it over to the title page photographer, who takes one photo of the title page and hands it over to the publisher data photographer who takes one photo and hands it over to someone who reshelves the book.

I'm thinking something like 5 seconds a book for the slowest operation that can't be done in parallel (photographing the title page, probably). Thats 12 x 60 = 720 books an hour =
27 hours = doable in a weekend. At the end of this operation all books should be barcoded, but uncatalogued.
Someone should also create the Library collection on LT and enter the titles B00001, B00002, .... B20000. (Hopefully this can be done automatically?)
Everything now depends on having a perfect match between the barcode number and the photos, so someone with close-to-OCD devotion to this task should be in charge. Now upload all the images to dropbox and let the fun begin.

For extras you could add good lighting, good cameras and a white-background, so the cover images can be auto-cropped and dimensions (HxL) automatically calculated afterwards.

Extra requirements: Lots of coffee, free sandwiches and volunteers to take over when someone's arms fall off :-)

If it was me, I'd go looking for a high-school class who'd like to make a little extra money for a class tour.

Or a group of IB students who need CAS points. There are 4 IB schools, and this ought to count as service.

>12 bnielsen: Sounds like a great protocol. I'm in. (Well, for the part that doesn't require a plane ticket. :-p)

And on the remote end, it'll give me a good opportunity to wrangle Latin American and Spanish-language sources with a bunch of people testing them. (Bug reports, beautiful bug reports!)

ETA: Maybe include the physical barcode in each of the photos (loose, covering margin of page within frame of photo), then affix it as the final step? Would add a bit of friction, but might be worth it in terms of maintaining sanity.

As for the specifics of the photography: I'd say go with one of the basic rig types recommended here. Cardboard would be fine.
http://diybookscanner.org/en/intro.html

It would be potentially possible to set cheap Canon cameras up to function semi-automatically as well.
Relevant link from preceding page:
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK

If set up competently, no time need be wasted in setting up or aligning shots (or even pressing a physical shutter). It will only be necessary to get each book settled into the rig(s) and open to the right page(s).

ETA: Here's the bare-bones version. http://www.instructables.com/id/Bargain-Price-Book-Scanner-From-A-Cardboard-Box/

>15 davidgn: I like your bare-bones link: Flat bed scanners are sloooooow :-)

>16 bnielsen: Sloooooooowwwwwnesssssss. :-D

We are a brand new intermediate School library with 1000 plus books from Nursury to xii standard classes
I wonder if library things can help us automization and catalogue the fiction and non fiction books and reference material for students to use by August when the schools reopend for new semester
Any help comments or ideas are very much appreciated
My email kgtc2012@gmail.com
Thanks in advance
Kvadiwala