I have a lot of Japanese language books in my personal library, as well as Japanese language learning textbooks, books about Japan, Japanese magazines, and the like.
Not just “a lot” of books, but “a whole lot of books” - likely more than 1000 of them.
It’s quite a mixed bag of titles and topics. I’m not at all sure of what I have. I’ve accumulated them over the years, from various sources, including buying new and used volumes from bookstores (both in the US and in Japan), buying many of them at library used book sales, ordering some complete manga series via eBay (typically from Japanese sellers), as well as picking up the odd volume or two as gifts from friends.
I started my collection very early in my language learning process, when I had little hope of being able to read anything more challenging than some simple children’s books - and I’ve kept on adding to the library over the course of more years than I care to count up, with the goal of someday being able to tackle more difficult ones. I’m still a long way from becoming a proficient reader, but WK has been a big help and motivator for me.
I’ve been meaning to make an inventory or catalog of the books in my library, but never seemed to be able to find the time to get started on such a project. However, an upcoming change in circumstances, namely the likelihood that I will be moving out of the house where I’ve been living for the past ten years (as the owner of the house intends to put it on the market soon), has led me to consider making a serious attempt to do the job.
So, my intent is to use this topic to record my attempt to make a complete catalog of my Japanese books, recording both successes and failures along the way, in the hope that it may help others who may be interested in cataloging their own personal libraries.
Right off the bat I ran into some problems, which I’m reposting from the ‘complaints’ thread::
So, I thought that some experimentation would be a good idea before committing to a specific approach for the whole library.
This is an example entry that I scanned with my phone using the libib app, as viewed on libib.com (the app and the website share the data).
I started out by scanning the barcode from the paperback copy of Alice in Wonderland that my niece gave me a few months ago as a birthday present.
The app was able to locate the book and a short description from the ISBN barcode scan (using the phone’s camera), but it does not have a cover lookup ability, rather it was necessary for me to take a photo of the book’s cover. I’m wondering whether either booklog or bookmeter may be able to import the ISBN, do the lookup, and retrieve a cover image - if so, it would save a lot of time that otherwise would be needed for snapping cover images (the sample shown here has lousy lighting and ‘framing’ of the cover)..
I’m also wondering about what indexing and search capabilities may be available through either booklog or bookmeter.
Anyway, I’m unsure of where this is going to lead me, but I figure that I will add some notes to this topic from time to time to chart my progress (and/or setbacks).
No promises as to how often I will post here.
But I’d welcome any others who may have experience in cataloging their own libraries, or who may have questions or comments about my experiences, to feel free to post here as well.
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I only added about 100-150.