Hunting Dewey Decimals

This summer, since a couple weeks after we moved here, I've been volunteering at the church library almost every Wednesday morning. It can be quite fun and it definitely is Good For Me. I get to use my sad, lonely MLS on something other than my own little projects.

There is a lot of work that needs to be done to it. First, it wasn't very well kept for most of the last 20 years so books are way out of date - my favorite is "Christianity and Communism Today". Written in 1960, it was probably of interest and relevance then, but now? Not so much. An excellent book for an archival library to hold onto, perhaps, but not for a small church library catering to those more interested in current Christianity than outdated ideas.

Second, there is a whole mound of donated books that aren't yet catalogued. And a lot of books have apparently sprouted legs and run off. And we're trying to get the card catalog straightened out - some books don't have cards and some cards don't have books, and it's not limited to just the two types I mentioned above. It's everywhere.

Oh, and you heard me correctly: it is an actual card catalog. There is no need to computerize the records and then require church-goers to check in and out books on a dedicated computer. We haven't even gotten to the stage of how we're setting up the borrowing system. The goal now is to get the books in order.

Since I'm the youngest of the volunteer crew by at least four decades, I've been using computer and internet to help look up the DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification system) numbers for books not yet assigned. Previously, the library was set up in a weird half-self-tailored and half-dewey classification system, with books in large groups such as "Faith in Life" and split between hard-cover and paperback. This has taken about a month of typing up ISBNs, titles, and authors while at the library, then looking them up for preferred DDC numbers. For most of them, I've been using a whole artillery of sites, none of which could do the task alone: ISBNdb.com, LC catalog, WorldCat, and librarything.com - even sometimes having to plain Google it. There were still a few searches that would prove unfruitful.

However, today I happened across an amazing tool - http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/
I started throwing all the books at it without even needing to consult the other sites for most of them. The ones I didn't find, I fiddled with on Google and determined what typos I'd made. I went back to try the ones that I'd been unsuccessful with earlier and found eight of them. I also made use of the tool linked to the classify site, http://deweyresearch.oclc.org/ddcbrowser2/ to determine better which one was most appropriate for the church library when the classify site showed an equal balance between one or two DDC numbers. For the total of about 250 books I've looked up, only three remained unfound.  THREE. That is pretty awesome.

So, in case you didn't get my drift, I'm in love with http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/ It has so many awesome things about it that just make the librarian in me salivate. It doesn't stop at giving you the MARC record which contains merely, and only sometimes, the classification number assigned by a particular library. Oh no. It gleans information of how many libraries in the OCLC network have the book and how many assigned what DDC number to it. I wish you do or could understand just how amazing this is, but it would help to trudge through 200 books without the Classify site first.

It wasn't for lack of researching that I only just discovered this tool; I'd looked a lot of places trying to determine what was best to use, including a focus on how to use my phone's camera (Google Nexus One) and a barcode scanner to try to speed up the process. I tried out a handful of programs but after one of them crashed on me when I had 40 scanned in, and the fact that not many books actually had a barcode that I had to deal with (if they have one, they most likely also have the DDC number on the back of their title page also - none of the older books have those listed). But for future reference, and perhaps helping anyone who happens to need the information and comes across this blogpost, aNobiit works okay - when it doesn't crash. It says it has the ISBNs but when I try to export them the email text body is devoid of ISBNs. aNobii scanner, which is  a different program but looks the same, *might* actually work but I just don't care to try it. However, today I accidentally discovered that Clipbot would work just fine. I haven't tested it but there's very little chance for it to crash and lose the ISBNs since there's no need to connect to internet at all; it simply reads and makes a lists of the numbers, then you can copy it to the phone clipboard and paste them into a text document (assuming you've got a text editor installed). This is exactly what I was looking for in the first place. *sigh*

Oh, and I forgot to mention that I don't have a data plan on my phone and there's no wifi at the church, hence ignoring those that queue up the web browser and search for the book as soon as you scan the barcode. I did get to play with these types a bit on our own home library, and it could be a fun project to catalog or at least record all the books in the house. Someday, someday.