Comments on: Using Zotero as a Personal Library Catalog

By: Trevor

Trevor — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 13:15:30 +0000

@Mark: one of my coworkers does exactly the same thing. He and his wife claim that when they want a book they generally can remember its color, even if they can’t remember its name.

By: mark

mark — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 01:45:30 +0000

My wife and I have our personal library ordered by colour. Gives you a whole new view of your book collection, including unlikely alliances. And it looks nice!

But yeah, using Zotero to organize your personal library is pretty cool.

By: Trevor

Trevor — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 09:44:55 +0000

I do want to make it public and I have thought about playing with Scribilo to this end. I will probably just need to shoehorn one of Zotero's export formats into something that Scribilo could read. Aside from library catalog stuff, the easiest thing to do is dump the whole list into one of the services that auto populates data based on ISBNs. Librarything does this, but once you go over 200 books you need to pay them. If memory serves me right Goodreads does the same thing without a cap on records. In the big picture Zotero 2.0 will cover this sharing piece, but once I have my catalog digitized I will probably try to stick it in a bunch of these services to see which provide the coolest feature sets.

By: Jeremy Boggs

Jeremy Boggs — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 08:52:01 +0000

Great idea, Trevor, and great post. Something else that might be useful to, especially if you wanted to make your collection public (and possibly let some of use borrow those books) is Scriblio. If there's a way to port the data from your Zotero collection into Scriblio, you'd be all set.

By: Trevor

Trevor — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 12:12:45 +0000

Thanks Ed, thanks for the correction re LC Classification vs LCSH. I'll edit the post. I have been meaning to check out the Jefferson Library Exhibit.

By: Ed Summers

Ed Summers — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 09:23:10 +0000

You probably meant LC Classification instead of LCSH right? Since you are in the area, the next time you are at LC you might be interested in popping in and looking at the Jefferson Library Exhibit which shows how Thomas Jefferson's personal library was arranged. He used a modified version of Francis Bacon's classification which was how LC's collection was arranged prior to 1897, when the Jefferson building opened its doors.