this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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I'm looking for something that I can self-host to keep a "card catalog" of our personal library. (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by ArchtypeZero@alien.top to c/main@selfhosted.forum
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My wife and I (well, mostly her) have a large and growing inventory of books. A couple thousand in the bookshelves. Aside from me having to figure out where to build more bookshelves into, another challenge we're having is keeping track of what we have.

I'm no newbie to self-hosting, but it's been mostly digital media. I got that stuff covered. Connecting into the house's internal services is already solved too, so it'd be remotely accessible when we need it.

I'm looking for some recommendations on software that'll allow us to build a card catalog of our inventory. The primary use case will be to be able to check if we own a particular book or not so that we know not to buy another copy when we see it at a book sale!

I've been to many book sales, and there's a lot of resellers who swarm the place with barcode scanners that do automatic price lookups on Amazon and other marketplaces. They're pretty quick, and I'd love to be able to use such a barcode scanner on our own inventory to quickly catalog the whole thing.

That all said... if there's another 3rd party service that isn't self-hosted, I'd be open to it too - but running it myself is obviously the first choice.

Open to suggestions!

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[–] regeneri@alien.top 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You might want to look at LibraryThing.

[–] clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

That's what I use. It works great. No idea if you can host your own though.

[–] Firenyth@alien.top 3 points 1 year ago

I use this app called bookshelf by Damir Juretic
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bookshelf.prod&pcampaignid=web_share

you can scan the barcodes, or even the ISBN text printed on inner cover.

can have multiple virtual bookshelf's to represent your physical shelfs if you like, has a search feature too.

can export and import csv files of the inventory too

no ads and free, I haven't had any issues with it.

[–] Kimbaras@alien.top 2 points 1 year ago

So, basically an inventory of your books?

​

If I got that right, I was looking for something similar but for miniatures.

I tried a couple of options and settled with InvenTree (https://inventree.org/) but to be honest, I'm not totally sold on it.

​

I've recently discovered HomeBox (https://github.com/hay-kot/homebox) and starting to play with it.

For my needs it could be better but I'm not far away from installing it and looking at the webUI.

​

If all you want is a "simple" inventory system, then take a look at both of those.

[–] Rise_Global@alien.top 2 points 1 year ago

If you are technical, try https://koha-community.org/

[–] virtualadept@alien.top 2 points 1 year ago

I have a separate installation of Shaarli to keep track of my books. I have a slightly modified Shaarli theme to make it fit the use case a little better.

[–] talent_deprived@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Dewey decimal system IIRC from my school librarian days in the 70's. I'd search like this:

https://github.com/topics/dewey-decimal

This might be a start:

https://github.com/SardineDude1

[–] adamshand@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

I'm not aware of anything purpose built that does this, but should be pretty easy to build something with Budibase or similar lowcode tool?

If you can be bothered putting in all the ISBNs into your database, it should even be pretty straight forward to implement a bar code scanner to lookup.

https://docs.budibase.com/docs/barcodeqr-field

[–] Itsthejoker@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honestly, that seems like a perfect use case for a spreadsheet.

[–] hickupper@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

This. Barcode scanner, spreadsheet and vlookup

[–] dungeonchurch@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

There are a lot of apps that do this, not sure about a self hosted web service