Bruji

I'm an elementary school librarian. Bookpedia could be just right for our relatively small school...~70 kids in K-8.
Looking for experiences with Bookpedia in a library.

Thanks
Rick in Maine

I've only used it for inventory of a private library, but at 5k books, it's still fast and stable. I don't use the loan-and-retrieve features, but I bet they suit your circulation needs. If most of your books have ISBNs, you will be able to input the data very quickly. You sure can't beat the price!

PS: the other Pedias will be helpful if you have CDs and DVDs in the collection.

Rick,
I've been using Bookpedia to catalogue the school library at a small k-8 Catholic school in Minneapolis. I'm volunteering my time to do it and I've worked all school year on it. I think I'm only about half done with 3500 books catalogued so far. I'm guessing they have about 7-9 thousand books. Although it's hard to tell since they quit cataloguing their books some years back.

We hope to put the catalogue either on-line or use an in-house access. I think we will have to create our own template to get the catalogue to show all the fields we want.

At this point we don't intend on using Bookpedia to check-out and check-in the books. The librarian will continue to use the pocket cards for that.

It has been taking me longer than I thought it would, mostly because I am a little too detailed (read: anal-retentive, ie:overly obsessed with minor details).

This is my method:
If there is an ISBN number, I type that in and the program goes and gets basic info. I try to keep everything uniform, so I will go through the entry and do clean-up. Author name listed as 'Last Name, First Name' and I include birth and death year if available.

If there is no ISBN, I will add the book manually. I try to include an image with every book added. Sometime I will find the old ones on e-bay with an image. I've wasted a lot of time looking for images and it would probably be quicker if I just scanned the cover myself, but at the school, I don't have a scanner available at the moment.

These are the other fields I use:
Publisher,
Genre
Publisher Place,
# Pages,
Format
Release
List Price
SUMMARY (I use the summary from the Accelerated Reader site [http://www.renlearn.com/store/quiz_home.asp], if available and then will add one more summary, either the Library of Congress summary or one from Barnes and Noble or School Library Journal or Wikipedia. If I can't find one on-line I will sometimes type one from the dust jacket.
ILLUSTRATOR
SERIES (if there is one)
DIMENSIONS (wide x tall)
AWARDS (if there are any)
LCCN
DEWEY
PAGE MARK (I use this field to indicate if we have more than one copy)
CHILDREN'S READING LEVEL
COMMENTS (in this field I include the copyright date, I list if there are illustrations, index, maps, etc and I nclude the word count from the Accelerated Reader program site. I also include in this field if the book was donated to the library and the name of the person who made the donation)
SUBJECTS (I try to use the subjects list from our local public library)

I have used all four CUSTOM FIELDS and have named them:
Accelerated Reader Level
Accelerated Reader Points
Dewey Top (F = fiction; E= Easy Reader; actual dewey number for non-fiction)
Dewey Bottom (first three letters of the author's last name)

The last two fields I use for printing up spine labels and pocket labels for new books added to the library.

Since we haven't published the catalogue yet, I'm not sure how it will work. But I hope that the teachers will able to do easy searches on all the fields and hopefully the students will have access, also.

I would love to see anyone else's catalogue if they have posted it on-line. And to hear how other people are using the Bookpedia program.
Jodi in Minneapolis, Minnesota

We are using our bookpedia in a city called Norfolk, Virginia at a bookstore called The Book Exchange. We're using the program for easy of use to find items for customers and to hopefully have the ability to see what items have a high resale value when they enter our collection(hopefully conor will integrate that feature soon). We're at 3000 books so far and thats about 7-9% of our barcoded stock, we do not plan to post the collection online for customers because we want them to enter the store to look at things, but the progarm has worked wonders so far, we cant wait till the 13 digit EAN change in janurary.

I have used Bookpedia to catalog my personal classroom library of about 1500 books. Using the firewire camera was effective with new books and capturing cover images. However, many of the barcodes on older books did not turn up as ISBN but as a retail code. The camera scan could not distinguish between them. Newer books were not a problem.

My collection is online here:
http://homepage.mac.com/oscartavernini/ ... index.html

I used ebay.com for many of the missing cover images, but haven't finished searching for all. Many images not found on Amazon are available on eBay.
Perhaps eBay could be one of the search sites built into the program itself as a new feature when searching for missing cover art.