5 ms·

If they are recent books (from about 1980) then they probably have a barcode on the back cover, so use that. My guess is that it won't be worth trying to automa

by bloak 8y ago

If they are recent books (from about 1980) then they probably have a barcode on the back cover, so use that. My guess is that it won't be worth trying to automatically recognise older books from the cover: a lot of them had a dust jacket, that goes missing, and a cover under the dust jacket that is not at all distinctive. The title might be on the spine, but how many online images show the spine clearly?

kabdib 7y ago
I tried doing a book catalog about ten years ago. I got about 80% recognition rate by using multiple numbers (ISBN, and the Library of Congress number) and multiple online data sources. It was a pretty slow process, to the point where simply keyboarding the information was easier and less error-prone, and I had to manually enter the books that didn't get any online matches anyway. Definitely not a "scan/beep/scan/beep" kind of thing. More like "scan . . . uh, scan . . . scan, damn you, SCAN I say! (beep) Okay . . . now the first problem is that 'The Sands of Mars' which I am holding is definitely not 'Great Montana Flapjack Recipes' on B&N, let's try the library of Congress . . . . nope, not 'Annals of 1959 Steelmaking', so (tap tappity-tap...)"
- Kim_Bruning 7y ago
  The last time I looked at this (admittedly quite a while ago) the book bar code contained the ISBN. What was causing the mismatches? Bar codes that did not contain the ISBN? Non-unique numbers?
  - mcguire 7y ago
    You would be surprised to see how many books have the wrong ISBN or have a mismatch between the barcode and the ISBN. Not as much of a problem with major publishers now, but some from the 80s and 90s were hilarious.
  - kabdib 7y ago
    The ISBN mappings were maybe fifty percent reliable, service by service. So you'd do three or four ISBN lookups and paw through the results, and then failover to the LOC. The Library of Congress numbers were more accurate, but more effort to enter. Nothing worked 100%, and the failure rate on some of the more obscure books was very high.

by bloak 8y ago

kabdib 7y ago

I tried doing a book catalog about ten years ago. I got about 80% recognition rate by using multiple numbers (ISBN, and the Library of Congress number) and multiple online data sources. It was a pretty slow process, to the point where simply keyboarding the information was easier and less error-prone, and I had to manually enter the books that didn't get any online matches anyway. Definitely not a "scan/beep/scan/beep" kind of thing. More like "scan . . . uh, scan . . . scan, damn you, SCAN I say! (beep) Okay . . . now the first problem is that 'The Sands of Mars' which I am holding is definitely not 'Great Montana Flapjack Recipes' on B&N, let's try the library of Congress . . . . nope, not 'Annals of 1959 Steelmaking', so (tap tappity-tap...)"

Kim_Bruning 7y ago
The last time I looked at this (admittedly quite a while ago) the book bar code contained the ISBN. What was causing the mismatches? Bar codes that did not contain the ISBN? Non-unique numbers?
- mcguire 7y ago
  You would be surprised to see how many books have the wrong ISBN or have a mismatch between the barcode and the ISBN. Not as much of a problem with major publishers now, but some from the 80s and 90s were hilarious.
- kabdib 7y ago
  The ISBN mappings were maybe fifty percent reliable, service by service. So you'd do three or four ISBN lookups and paw through the results, and then failover to the LOC. The Library of Congress numbers were more accurate, but more effort to enter. Nothing worked 100%, and the failure rate on some of the more obscure books was very high.