Economy Size Geek - Organizing a Library

At first glance, you might assume that I'm going to discuss code libraries in this article, but instead, I'm talking about an actual library—one made of books, magazines and other dead-tree sources of wisdom. I have always collected books, and each new project or pastime becomes an excuse to expand my library. I don't always know what I have or, more important, where a certain book is. I try to keep my library organized in a physical sense, but I've always wanted a system that kept better track of my books.

The goals for this project are pretty straightforward. I need something that can track all of the books I own. A big part of my collection is in my library at home, but I also have a large set of technical books at my office. I'd love to be able to see images of the covers (à la Delicious Monster—a Mac program that originally inspired me to sort this out). I also need something to show me where in the library the book is physically—the cabinet and shelf would be nice. One last thing is data entry. I have several thousand books, and I'd prefer not to have to type in a lot of information.

The cool part about the Open Source world is that you can access software that is way beyond the scale of what you need. In the case of this project, I found Koha. According to the Web site, “Koha is the first open-source Integrated Library System (ILS). In use worldwide, its development is steered by a growing community of libraries collaborating to achieve their technology goals.” The project is targeted at actual libraries, which sounded like overkill, but I could not resist downloading and taking it for a spin.

I decided to play with the development version (as the last release was June 2009). The first step was to check out the code repository:

git clone git://git.koha.org/pub/scm/koha.git kohaclone

The repository actually had install instructions for several distributions. Because I'm running Ubuntu, I followed those instructions. Based on the differences between the Web site instructions for installing on Hardy (8.04) and the instructions in the development version, it looks like a number of packages outside the standard package tree have been added. That is a good sign, because it means installation will get easier and easier. Be warned though, Koha is built using Perl, and a few Perl libraries are not currently packaged in Jaunty. The instructions show you how to use CPAN to install them properly (although that means you will have CPAN versions that are not controlled by the package system—a side effect of working with CPAN). After following all the instructions and getting everything installed, I ran through the Web install to set up the database.

Once everything was up and “running”, I was ready to dive in to the heady world of running my own library. After spending an inordinate amount of time figuring out that I needed to provide some default values for the library and the type of content I was going to track, I was ready to add my first book. Pulling up Koha's add form presents a huge page of options, most of which meant very little to me (such as Leader, Control Number Identified and Fixed Length Data Elements). I forged ahead by trying to search for one of my test books by ISBN. I had to do something called a Z39.50 search. This is a protocol used for getting book information from other libraries. In the process, I learned that I had to add my own Z39.50 sources. I used the Library of Congress, because I figured it would have the most complete records (Settings are z390.loc.gov:7090 Database:Voyager - Syntax USMARC). Once all that was set up, I was able to add the book.

Figure 1. The Koha catalog screen—something tells me this is overkill.

All of the above was a lot of work, and I added only a single book. As much as I would like to use an industrial-strength tool, the system was too confusing for me as a layperson (my wife was kind enough to point out that there is a reason it is called Library Science). If you want to see what a properly configured Koha system is capable of, go to the Plano ISD library system (see Resources), which is running a version of Koha. It shows the book covers and even has a shelf browser. So if you have your own public library, Koha is really neat, but I realized I needed something else.