melannen | #booksort

#booksort

Last night I:

-had to go to Boring Meeting after work
-was stuck in traffic
-did not have time to eat dinner first, so heated up a can of stuff to take with
-dropped can of stuff all over parking lot, did not have dinner
-apparently only had 3 DPNs with my sock, so could not even knit during meeting.
~Finally! Caught! A! Snorlax! During! The! Meeting! :D :D :D :D

I think I now have all the original PokeGo pokemon except the legendary and regional ones, maybe it's time to quit finally?

Anyway, booksort! Yeah sorry there's going to be a lot of this for awhile.

This is going even slower than my worst predictions, sigh. Unfortunately I now have, like, three days to get it to a reasonably tidy pausing point, so I guess that's my weekend!

I have figured out (why did it take so long?) that most of my books sort fairly naturally into four base-level categories, as such: Things To Make And Do; Stuff About People; Stuff About Not People; Weird Stuff. AKA: Applied Sciences; Social Sciences; Biological and Physical Sciences; Not Science At All.

There are things that I am still unsure about (Do books about Homo floresiensis go in Stuff About People or Stuff About Not People or in Weird Stuff with the dead bodies and the fairylore? How about on mummification, are they people or medical science or religion/magic or how-to? Do biographies of artists go with books on how art is made, or books on people? Is gender a Thing About People, a Weird Inexplicable Thing, a biological science things, or a Thing To Make And Do?) Most of them I have managed to narrow down my constantly reminding myself this classification system is about why I personally am interested in a thing, not about some sort of universal system of kinds, and find a place.

I'm stumped on ~200 books that sort of group into a category of language/semiotics/symbology, such as: undeciphered scripts, calligraphy, cryptography, linguistics, etymology and toponymy, translation, poetic forms, fiction writing advice and process, histories of SF fandom, etc.

I kind of want to keep them all together, but I can't decide which of the four top-levels they'd all fit together in. Do they follow folklore and storytelling and unsolved mysteries and sigils and amulets and futurisms into Weird Stuff (grammar and spelling both mean 'magic', after all)? Do they go into Things to Make And Do with puzzle books and how-tos and artists' biographies and books about comics and design motifs? Do they go into Social Sciences with history and anthropology and subcultures and cartography and assorted biographies of people? Do I split them up and put the mysteries in one category and the histories in one category and the poets' handbooks in a third? Do I keep them their own subcat?

Augh.

I have, however, figured out that it is much more productive to pull up a pile of books and go "okay, I have to get rid of at least 10% - 15% of these, which 1-2 are going?" than to agonize over how much joy each one brings me. I can pull out my 1-2 least favorite much more easily than deciding how much I *really* need every one. So we're going with that method instead.

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But you are ignoring the period, which over-rides commas and semicolons!

It's supposed to be:

Things To Make And Do;
Stuff About People;
Stuff About Not People;
Weird Stuff.

AKA Applied Sciences,
Social Sciences,
Biological and Physical Sciences;
Not Science At All.

...and I was inconsistent about my semicolons because I too am sleepy. :P I will go fix it.

Ahh. I understand now! All becomes clear.

My nonfiction is just straight up alpha by author (as opposed to my fiction, which is sorted by color), so I have no strong opinions on classification systems.

I want to get it by topic for the purpose of weeding (so I can compare, say, all the books about the War of 1812 in the Chesapeake that I own, just in case I don't really need six). Beyond that it's by size (for space efficiency reasons) and then each shelf is individually sorted into a rainbow by color, which I've found equally pleasant to look at and easier to find things in than a full by-color sort that flows across all the shelves. :D

I envy people who do this. My book storage/organization method is "original bookshelves ruthlessly organized by space" and then "whatever fits jammed in above and beside."

I mean, that's what it is in *practice*, usually, but there's a base organization under it. :P I got to the point about ten years ago though that if it didn't have at least some kind of base organization, I would never find anything. And I do pull books for reference fairly often so I need to be able to find stuff (also I have, like, an internal 'don't end up like Grandma' rule that once a collection of stuff reaches the point where you can't quickly access something if you want to, it's a hoard, not a collection, and it needs to go.) It helps that my LibraryThing catalog is scrupulously updated, so I can use that as an index, as long as they're sorted by something LibraryThing tracks.

(also I have, like, an internal 'don't end up like Grandma' rule that once a collection of stuff reaches the point where you can't quickly access something if you want to, it's a hoard, not a collection, and it needs to go.)

"I feel so called out rn" as they say

I love LibraryThing too! Although they do seem to lose some data -- the covers from Amazon are always all fucked up, and I swear I have books that are missing from the most recent database.

The covers from Amazon are in fact always fucked up, but that's because Amazon is awful and there's only so much they can do within Amazon's rules. There's an option to turn off all Amazon covers, and then you can go in and manually choose a cover from the user-uploaded ones. (You can also use that dialog to steal the Amazon-provided cover and pretends it's a user upload, not that I would ever suggest breaking Amazon's TOS that way.) It's a little more trouble, but Amazon will no longer have the ability to random change what cover displays on your book.

(There's also a widget you can put on your front page that shows you a rotating selection of new user-uploaded covers for Amazon-covered books you own, if you just want a fun way to waste time.)

Do you mean you have books you added to your catalog that aren't appearing it in anymore, or---? There was a data loss issue late last year, iirc, but they managed to retrieve all the books from it, although some of them might have weird metadata or be in the wrong collection. Or you might just have books that accidentally weren't added to your default collection - I've panicked about that a few times.

IF you really have lost books in your catalog, if you report it on the "bug collectors" talk group, they're usually pretty diligent about tracking down and fixing those types of bugs; ongoing book loss isn't something I've seen anyone else report lately.

You can also use that dialog to steal the Amazon-provided cover and pretends it's a user upload, not that I would ever suggest breaking Amazon's TOS that way

I would NEVER do such a thing, GASP. -- Yeah, the problem is I've been a member for 10 years now and when I started, I was wayyy more naive about using Amazon data including covers and titles, and Amazon wasn't quite as evil. And at this point, the whole library is too big to edit -- there are hundreds and hundreds of bad or missing covers, and the number just gets bigger.

Do you mean you have books you added to your catalog that aren't appearing it in anymore

More like, books I know I have, or can actually find, that are older and not anywhere in my catalogue, altho that might be related to a problem they had with searches. It's happened often enough I'm kinda skeptical of the integrity of the database.

....I have not had the best of luck with the bug collecting group.

It's improved the last couple years because they hired someone whose main job was to respond to those kinds of threads.

IDK - there are definitely still issues with lag in the search indexing, sometimes up to a couple days, but I've never had any data loss other than one-time things that were reported and acknowledged, and I've never seen any of the other long-time regular power users in Talk complaining about database integrity (EVERYTHING ELSE, they complain about...) If it's all older stuff, is it possible they just weren't ever added?

Updating all the covers from the old Amazon ones as I go is part of why this process is taking so long. :P

I've never seen any of the other long-time regular power users in Talk complaining about database integrity (EVERYTHING ELSE, they complain about...)

....ahahahaha

If it's all older stuff, is it possible they just weren't ever added?

That's what I was thinking, but I was really rigorous about adding books when I started (plus I had uh fewer books, LOL). It's probably more human error on my part, I guess, but it still makes me suspicious.

Updating all the covers from the old Amazon ones as I go is part of why this process is taking so long. :P

Amazon just did it AGAIN, nearly every single fucking book with "Oxford" in the title and an Amazon cover now has this image! (and stuff like Oxford World's Classics got hit too)

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/0192833804.01._SX200_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

That was at least 50-75 covers to fix alone. Bleah. I just want maybe like a warning flag or something, altho I know they probably can't do that. It's so demoralizing to find my covers are not just fucked, they keep getting more and more fucked.

If you turn off the Amazon covers, at least it won't get any worse...? (And that doesn't erase the data of which Amazon cover you would have had, I was worried about that for awhile, but it still shows as selected in the cover change dialog, just not anywhere else.) I find going in and fixing Amazon covers relaxing, but then I still have 4000 unfixed ones, so not that relaxing.

I don't think there's any way to get a warning if one is about to change (amazon just...does it, silently) but you can go into your stats/memes and get a catalog filter of all your books with Amazon covers.

Also, the mobile app has a built-in way to photograph & correct covers that makes it way easier to add not-cheating real ones than it used to be.

That is all BRILL, thank you!

+10000.

(How many sideways books on your shelves right now? We just finished a 17-bag friends-of-library sort so everybody is standing soldier right now.)

Welllllll are you at all familiar with the crossed letters the Victorians wrote? because it sort of goes like, the books are shelved upright and then there are more books shelved sidewise until they hide the original books.

/o\

Oh, you mean that kind of sideways!

Mine are mostly shelved with one row of books that are very close to the full height of the shelf, and a second row in front of flat ones that are not close to the height of the shelf. I only start thinking of it as "jammed in above and beside" when I have horizontal ones jammed into the bare inch of space left above the vertical row, or face-out ones in the bare inch of space in front of the horizontal row!

(For awhile I had my fiction paperbacks as 2 inches or so of books laid flat across the back of the shelf to create a "riser" for a back tier, and then a second lower tier in front. I used books from long series for the risers, so I could see at least part of the spines of all the others.

...I had to stop because I needed the vertical space above the lower tiers.)

Mine are mostly shelved with one row of books that are very close to the full height of the shelf, and a second row in front of flat ones that are not close to the height of the shelf.

Mine used to look like that, yeah. Then I....got more books! but not a lot more bookcases.

I only start thinking of it as "jammed in above and beside" when I have horizontal ones jammed into the bare inch of space left above the vertical row, or face-out ones in the bare inch of space in front of the horizontal row!

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