LibraryThing book id and work id fields

I've added fields for the LibraryThing "book id" and "work id". Here they are in the catalog:


You can find them on your Display Styles page, under "Miscellaneous" on the right.
https://www.librarything.com/settings/styles

These fields are quite "inside baseball," but some members have asked for them. More similar stuff coming soon.

Also in export?

Yeah. It's called "book_id" and "workcode"--it's been there for quite a while.

Since I've been on LT, I've always used the BCID (which I'll continue to do), but this is so nice for everyone else. What a great addition to what everyone can do here! Thanks.

What do you use it for?

I don't use the new id slots at all because I've always used (and will continue to use) the BCID slot - which identifies each unique book of mine. In the past, when others wanted a way to create book id numbers, I've always suggested they use that BCID slot (even if they were not BookCrossing members). With the newly created id slots, everyone has a slot to use without being confused by that BCID slot.

Thank you so much!

Maybe I'm not understanding this very well. It seems that those id slots are prefilled. I originally thought they were for creating unique id numbers.

*confused*

They are the book and work ID that have always existed, the ones you see in the URL for a book. But they were not in the catalog display before.

Ah. Right. These are the IDs that already existed. Adding your own private numbers is not yet supported. Soon.

>9 anglemark: >10 timspalding:

Oh, okay. Thanks for the clarification!

Adding your own private numbers is not yet supported. Soon.

This is what I thought the new feature was.

Thanks, Tim -- this will be of great use to combiners, and will also probably come in handy when looking up the numbers for forcing touchstones.

>11 SqueakyChu:

I've got private numbers working, but I want to make it do automatic things, like produce bar codes and other checksum-ed numbers from existing numbers, so people have better ways than coming up with their own numbers and adding them all.

>13 timspalding:

That sounds so complicated to me, but I bet other users will love it!

Well, we want to let users use real barcodes, either ones we provide in sheets or ones they already have. The easiest is if we provide people with consecutive numbers, starting at 1. Then you can get a sheet starting at one for a few bucks--from us or many others. But that requires a way to assign those numbers that doesn't screw up when people add and delete books. Second, many barcode systems add checksums to their numbers, just like ISBNs do. We want to handle those intelligently.

Anyway, the programmers are talking it through on Monday.

So, you could add your own, say, acquisition number, a unique number for each volume? Am I understanding this right? Otherwise, I'm having a hard time seeing how private numbers would be different functionally than the call number field.

>16 PhaedraB:

Libraries distinguish between a call number and a barcode number. The latter are arbitrary numbers, generally taken off a sheet starting from 0.

And yes, we're going to allow items.

The thing that hangs it up for me is that the numbers are so susceptible to change.

Isn't this then, a good reason to initiate your own numbering system?

>19 SqueakyChu:

What numbers are? Your book id is fixed in the heavens. Work codes—yeah, they change a lot.

*sigh*

I'll stick to my BookCrossing numbers then. :)

Why? Comfused.

Simply because each BCID identifies only one individual book. Each of my individual books has, if I decide to put it there, a journal entry on BookCrossing. Another copy of the same book has a different journal entry on BookCrossing. This is a BookCrossing thing, obviously, and has nothing to do with library science. It's more about book tracking.

That's the same as a book id. They're different for every book--completely unique, even between users. And they're eternal.

We're going to add another layer for items--so you can have separate tracking data for books you have more than one copy of. But it will be in addition to the book code--so book id 31421312, item 2--and it won't affect users who don't want it.

I'm sticking to the BCID for my own BookCrossing purposes, but I'll clearly be looking at how people on LT use your system to track books. I guess it will be most useful for libraries using your new "check in/check out/hold" system which is great.

I can also see a difference between your system and the BCID. Your system needs the "item 2". The BCID system does not need anything other than the BCID number. Of course, your system identifies a limitless number of books while the BCID system can only (currently) identify up to 99,999,999,999 books. :)

I'm not getting through some how. Later, maybe.

I think I know the issue.

The BCID is a secret number which is known only to the person who registers the book on BookCrossing and to those who actually have the book in hand and can see the number. It is not public information.

Ah. Yes. Fair enough. That's useful for that purpose. I'm not sure it's useful for much else :)

>18 timspalding:. In Denmark, libraries can get a barcode interval from a central authority, so they don't overlap each other. I don't know if that's the case in other countries too.

I even found a link to it (in Danish):
http://www.dbc.dk/produkter-services/numre-og-stregkoder/stregkodeetiketter-sekv...

Any news yet? Is bar code support in the works? Thanks for letting us know. We appreciate you all more than we can say!

We would be ready to start barcoding our books next school year. We'd much rather support LT by purchasing directly from you. Looking forward to hearing how this is coming together. Thanks!

Tim tweeted a request a few days ago for suggestions for someone who could print barcodes from given numbers. Don't know what response he got - but he is still working on it!

I am looking for a way to add my own IDs to my books in my library collection. The IDs have the format "Subject-Serial", where the "Serial" field is a running serial number that starts from 001 for each Subject. I thought of exporting the books, using Excel to create the IDs, and reimporting them. Can I use Book ID (or BCID) for this purpose ? Will import work as expected ? From this thread, it looks like Book ID is an internal ID and not meant to support a private ID.

>34 msriganesh: Import will not import all the data you export, so personally I wouldn't advise it.

You might want to try the Custom Call Number field, although there's no way to add something to that field en masse. You'd have to add the custom numbers one book at a time.

It says earlier in the thread that support for private numbers is coming soon, is there a time frame for this ? If it is going to be a while, I'll use the Custom Call Number field as you have suggested.

Looks like import only imports a subset of fields, any idea why that is ? If it could import the Custom Call Number field for example, I would be all set !

The custom call numbers is the support for the private numbers.

Importing leaves off a lot of detail, particularly if your books have ISBNs, where it then disregards much of the info in your import and uses what it finds in the lookup, so it's not really recommended aside of a last-resort sort of thing. But there is the custom call numbers as well as the barcode fields.

If you remove the ISBN it should just import what's there, no?

>39 JerryMmm:

Within the very limited set of available fields in the "universal import" CSV, yes, but that doesn't include most things.

They devoted a great deal of time to perfecting imports for people coming over to LT from competitors, but basically none to enabling people to usefully re-import existing LT data. (Lorannen is sympathetic to the idea, but she neither prioritizes RSIs nor actually fixes them, so that doesn't mean much.)

It also means you'd have to remove & later readd them all which would be AWFUL for anyone with a fair amount of books.

Actually it handles duplicates rather well - the choice is not to add duplicates or to add them by...well. By adding the tags from the import data. Since I mostly want to group things (add the imported books to collections and such), having a tag I can filter by works fine. I'm not sure it can add anything else.

But yeah, being able to import the export files would be _wonderful_ and incredibly useful. I wish...

Can members add their own numbering system for books yet?

>43 KnoxUnitedChurch: The 'Other Call Number' field has been available for quite a while now. There is also now a barcode field.

>43 KnoxUnitedChurch: MarthaJeanne is right! Here's our blog post with details.