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Shelf Care step 2
Saturday, November 12th, 2022 11:08 pmOver Memorial Day weekend I helped my parents move thirty five years worth of stuff out of a storage unit. Some simple math suggested they'd spent tens of thousands of dollars on rent for objects, and I managed to convince them that not paying a couple hundred dollars a month was worth a weekend of physical activity and a short-term investment of psychic energy to decide what to keep and discard.
This being a Stone family storage unit, there were roughly two dozen boxes of books. Most if not all of these had been easily accessible in our house when I was a kid, but had migrated to the storage unit because my family acquires books at a much higher rate than we acquire bookshelf space. One of my goals in the storage unit exit plan was to minimize the number of boxes my mom need to sort through because (a) "I need to go through this and decide what to keep, but I don't have time" is exactly why we have a storage unit of long-forgotten stuff and (b) I needed to save her limited sorting attention span for questions like "Can we get rid of this box of tax documents from 1992" and "Do you need this spiral notebook from your Masters of Education course?" Other than a few emotionally salient books she spotted at the top of a box, I was able to convince my mom that my garage would be the best place for the book boxes to land. (Fortunately I was also able to claim the large bookshelf they'd been siting on for decades.) As part of this bargain I agreed to catalog the contents before selling or donating any of the books. I promised to do so as a winter project, since I had three months of summer adventures planned.
I had some vague ideas about cobbling together a mobile app that could scan barcodes and dump ISBN codes into a Google Sheet, which a script would then populate through Internet lookups. (This was partly a plot to try out AppSheet, a "no code" app building product that colleagues of mine have built which helps fill what I think is an untapped ecological niche.) Then last weekend I remembered that LibraryThing exists, and probably already has a book-scanning app. Sure enough, the small development team that's still maintaining a website that very much feels like it's still the aught-naughts has had enough bandwidth to build iOS and Android apps with barcode scanning and cover photo uploading, in addition to catalog data management.
After a week of feeling not-great but testing negative for COVID, I got a positive test on Monday. (I'm pretty sure I picked it up during my Halloween weekend of dancing.) "Isolate in the front half of the house for a week" is exactly the excuse I needed to catalog a thousand books on the shelves in my living room. This kilolibro are mostly volumes I've personally acquired, plus a contingent from Kelly. I've yet to delve into the garage library of family legacy, though it does contain a shelf of Jungian psychology from when we moved all the stuff out of my mom's office in the summer of 2020. There's more mom-office books on the "spirituality and woo" shelf in another room, still more on the guest bedroom shelves along with art, kids books, and four decades of National Geographic Magazines. Oh, and I accepted several boxes of Dragon Magazine from a friend that I should either read or pass on. And while I'm at it, I might as well catalog the hundreds compact discs in the house, in case we need to convince our homeowners insurance that ten thousand dollars worth of music went up in flames.
It turns out that book cataloging is a messy-enough adventure that a dedicated domain-specific UX is a win, even though I now need to find a separate solution for cataloging my board game collection. There are, of course, books that predate barcodes, and I've even got a few dozen that came before ISBN was introduced, around the time my parents entered college. There are books whose Library of Congress Card Number doesn't come up in any catalog search. There are books with many editions and reprintings, and boy howdy to publishers like to change covers. A single ISBN often has multiple database entries, with varying levels of metadata quality. There are books with barcodes which aren't ISBNs (only some of which are mass-market paperbacks with an ISBN barcode on the inside cover). I found at least two books where the ISBN and barcode printed on the back cover belonged to an unrelated book, and didn't match the ISBN printed inside the book. My favorite is 978-1-56581-231-4 / 1-56581-231-X which has been used by dozens of books and shows up as example input to a couple open source barcode generators. Were publishers following some ISBN instruction manual and didn't realize they were supposed to assign their own number?
I've known for a long time that I tend to buy books aspirationally. I've probably finished only 5% of those thousand books, and read significant parts of another 5–10%. (There are also books on the shelf I know I'll never be motivated to read; we really need to get a Little Free Library set up.) In high school I noticed that the number of non-assigned books I read each year seemed to be decreasing. In college I had very little time for non-scholastic books, though I managed to reread each Lord of the Rings for their cinematic release. I had grand hopes of getting back to reading a few dozen books a year after graduating, but by that time the Internet had gotten really engrossing. It took me a decade to finish Don Quixote but it feels like I go through a hundred thousand words in a couple months on Wikipedia. I also read a lot of stuff at work, but "a hundred design docs and five hundred code reviews" doesn't bring the same set of accomplishment as reading a series of novels.
As a coda, I'd like to share the funniest item I found in the storage unit adventure. There was a box in the far corner, under and behind everything else in storage, clearly one of the first items packed away in the mid-1980s when my brother was a baby and my dad had converted the garage into a music studio. The box was labeled
This being a Stone family storage unit, there were roughly two dozen boxes of books. Most if not all of these had been easily accessible in our house when I was a kid, but had migrated to the storage unit because my family acquires books at a much higher rate than we acquire bookshelf space. One of my goals in the storage unit exit plan was to minimize the number of boxes my mom need to sort through because (a) "I need to go through this and decide what to keep, but I don't have time" is exactly why we have a storage unit of long-forgotten stuff and (b) I needed to save her limited sorting attention span for questions like "Can we get rid of this box of tax documents from 1992" and "Do you need this spiral notebook from your Masters of Education course?" Other than a few emotionally salient books she spotted at the top of a box, I was able to convince my mom that my garage would be the best place for the book boxes to land. (Fortunately I was also able to claim the large bookshelf they'd been siting on for decades.) As part of this bargain I agreed to catalog the contents before selling or donating any of the books. I promised to do so as a winter project, since I had three months of summer adventures planned.
I had some vague ideas about cobbling together a mobile app that could scan barcodes and dump ISBN codes into a Google Sheet, which a script would then populate through Internet lookups. (This was partly a plot to try out AppSheet, a "no code" app building product that colleagues of mine have built which helps fill what I think is an untapped ecological niche.) Then last weekend I remembered that LibraryThing exists, and probably already has a book-scanning app. Sure enough, the small development team that's still maintaining a website that very much feels like it's still the aught-naughts has had enough bandwidth to build iOS and Android apps with barcode scanning and cover photo uploading, in addition to catalog data management.
After a week of feeling not-great but testing negative for COVID, I got a positive test on Monday. (I'm pretty sure I picked it up during my Halloween weekend of dancing.) "Isolate in the front half of the house for a week" is exactly the excuse I needed to catalog a thousand books on the shelves in my living room. This kilolibro are mostly volumes I've personally acquired, plus a contingent from Kelly. I've yet to delve into the garage library of family legacy, though it does contain a shelf of Jungian psychology from when we moved all the stuff out of my mom's office in the summer of 2020. There's more mom-office books on the "spirituality and woo" shelf in another room, still more on the guest bedroom shelves along with art, kids books, and four decades of National Geographic Magazines. Oh, and I accepted several boxes of Dragon Magazine from a friend that I should either read or pass on. And while I'm at it, I might as well catalog the hundreds compact discs in the house, in case we need to convince our homeowners insurance that ten thousand dollars worth of music went up in flames.
It turns out that book cataloging is a messy-enough adventure that a dedicated domain-specific UX is a win, even though I now need to find a separate solution for cataloging my board game collection. There are, of course, books that predate barcodes, and I've even got a few dozen that came before ISBN was introduced, around the time my parents entered college. There are books whose Library of Congress Card Number doesn't come up in any catalog search. There are books with many editions and reprintings, and boy howdy to publishers like to change covers. A single ISBN often has multiple database entries, with varying levels of metadata quality. There are books with barcodes which aren't ISBNs (only some of which are mass-market paperbacks with an ISBN barcode on the inside cover). I found at least two books where the ISBN and barcode printed on the back cover belonged to an unrelated book, and didn't match the ISBN printed inside the book. My favorite is 978-1-56581-231-4 / 1-56581-231-X which has been used by dozens of books and shows up as example input to a couple open source barcode generators. Were publishers following some ISBN instruction manual and didn't realize they were supposed to assign their own number?
I've known for a long time that I tend to buy books aspirationally. I've probably finished only 5% of those thousand books, and read significant parts of another 5–10%. (There are also books on the shelf I know I'll never be motivated to read; we really need to get a Little Free Library set up.) In high school I noticed that the number of non-assigned books I read each year seemed to be decreasing. In college I had very little time for non-scholastic books, though I managed to reread each Lord of the Rings for their cinematic release. I had grand hopes of getting back to reading a few dozen books a year after graduating, but by that time the Internet had gotten really engrossing. It took me a decade to finish Don Quixote but it feels like I go through a hundred thousand words in a couple months on Wikipedia. I also read a lot of stuff at work, but "a hundred design docs and five hundred code reviews" doesn't bring the same set of accomplishment as reading a series of novels.
As a coda, I'd like to share the funniest item I found in the storage unit adventure. There was a box in the far corner, under and behind everything else in storage, clearly one of the first items packed away in the mid-1980s when my brother was a baby and my dad had converted the garage into a music studio. The box was labeled
Pants that are slightly too small for Edie.That's right, we've spent three and a half decades safeguarding garments just in case my mom shrinks.
