HELP! Cataloging lots of books!

Hello!

I am a teacher in a small elementary school, and I am preparing for the project of cataloging all of our books into LibraryThing. I use LibraryThing for my personal library, but that's easier to maintain and I always just search the name of the book when I get it to add it.

I am hoping there is a way to use a barcode scanner to scan multiple books at a time, and add them in all at once. I see a section for importing, but I'm not sure that's what I'm looking for. Any advice on the quickest way to get a thousand books or so entered would be great! Thank you!

If you can scan ISBNs for most of the books, you should be able to scan the ISBNs into a spreadsheet/CSV or .txt file, and then import that using the "universal upload" option. (Or if you already have any file of all the ISBNs, you can just import that.)

It will treat each ISBN like a new "add books" entry, so any tagging/custom call numbers/notes/etc will still have to be added one book at a time, but it should get all the books that have ISBNs into the catalog pretty fast!

The LT app scans book barcodes pretty efficiently. I've found Bowker Books In Print to be the most reliable source. You may want to test the app to see if it's a fast enough method for you. I'm assuming you won't do any editing while scanning.

Keep in mind when using Bowker Books as a source that it often adds dashes in the ISBN and reverses the order of the author's name. These entries can create search, combination, and sorting issues.

>1 AALC-Library: Either the LT app, which I agree is fairly efficient (imperfect but good), or the CueCat scanner might help.

https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/CueCat_barcode_scanning

Even the best sources don't save you from having to check the data on each book if you want

a) Really accurate information about your copy.
b) Tags and collections and personal notes.
c) Accurate covers.

>5 MarthaJeanne: Amen! (I'm currently going over some of my books to check Publisher information.)

Even if the entry accurately identifies the book the library has, the date your copy was printed can be different. Publishers also like to change covers on new print runs, which is (one reason) why Amazon covers are unreliable.