On Building A Library | Hacker News Reader

On Building A Library

softholmsyndrome.com

25 pointsunimpressive6 comments

Love this, we have a similar issue with the library at work, no library system, our librarian quit and they never replaced them, I built some stuff that your'e welcome to base some stuff off of it's on github and uses angularjs and firebase :)

I used openlibrary to pull the metadata (not sure the restrictions), but may be nice to mirror all that data somewhere for low/no cost?

https://github.com/onaclovtech/library

I also use this for my personal library at home (nice when you go out to verify you own a particular book of a series already).

Good luck!

> I used openlibrary to pull the metadata (not sure the restrictions), but may be nice to mirror all that data somewhere for low/no cost?

If you mean the Internet Archives OpenLibrary project that data is apparently in a messy legal situation:

https://openlibrary.org/developers/licensing

The Internet Archive actually has an API that I didn't notice and would have coded against instead if I'd known about it, I'll probably add a mention of it to the article as an alternate source of ISBN numbers:

https://openlibrary.org/developers/api

I hadn't read that first one, but yea I used the developers API for my stuff, I have been using AngularJS so I made a service it's located here: https://github.com/onaclovtech/library/blob/master/library.j...

it's an ISBN search only, but could be improved.

Also if you have a Part Two I'd love to hear about it.

If you tried using the barcodes, what you'd find is that before the mid-90s, many publishers did not make the barcode match the ISBN. Although the book has an ISBN and a barcode, the barcode data is for some alternate publisher/bookseller system. It was very frustrating to realize this when cataloging my books around 2000.

One thing you should be aware of is that ISBNs can be reused. In theory they shouldn't, but mistakes happen as well as temporary shortages of ISBNs allocated to publishers.

If you want a free and unencumbered source of ISBN data then try the British National Bibliography dataset from the British Library. See http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/download.html or browse online http://bnb.data.bl.uk/doc/resource/012877800

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