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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 mult
by 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 agoThe 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 agoYou 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 agoThe 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.