Re:Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mounta...
by kd5bjo on Sunday May 05, 2019 @10:42AM
(#19833024)
> If you don't leave enough space you'll have to shift all the books after that letter.
This is what card files were originally invented for— number all the shelves, put your new book wherever there’s room, and put a card with the title and shelf number in a sorted drawer. When you get rid of the book, get rid of the card.
Re:Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mounta...
by dredmorbius on Sunday May 05, 2019 @11:43AM
(#19833346)
That works well for closed stack collections. Open ones, not so much.
I worked on a similar project, with thousands of books to organize. We did just that, because it seemed common sense. We had a couple of issues:
1. We found that sorting books by category took quite a lot of time. For every book we had to spend a couple of seconds deciding in which category it should go. By the time we started wishing we had put them all together, sorted only by alphabet, it was already late.
2. Shelving books alphabetically is a problem when they keep coming and going. How do you know how much space to leave on the shelf for a specific letter? Maybe now you have 10 books by Stephen King, but the next container will have 50 more. If you don't leave enough space you'll have to shift all the books after that letter.