Miscellaneous bib projects - nominalie/bib-projects GitHub Wiki

Project.I.

DNB library project

Pet project for a colleague who volunteered at a German Language School. They have a small in-house library of German books. Years before, someone had created a simple mySQL db to record book titles with a basic check-out system. They wanted a modern web OPAC & checkout solution for the students. It had to be easy to administer by a non-tech b/c no resources. How to transform messy homegrown bibs with only title & author info, plus some pub dates, entered haphazardly in EN and/or DE by hand with many mistakes and some character encoding issues to boot?

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Deutschenationalbibliothek to the rescue https://portal.dnb.de/metadataShop.htm

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Exported title table from the db. Then ran the limited data through DNB to look for matches. There were multiple phases as I discovered new idiosyncrasies in the input data and corrected stupid errors on my part. Resulting spreadsheet was cleaned up and bib data uploaded to LibraryThing. In LibraryThing, no technical skills are required to modify items if desired. The German Language School now pays a modest fee for their clean, easy to use, TinyCat web catalogue. They add new publications, and link book covers etc. via their LibraryThing account, primarily relying on bibliographic data available online (ISBN lookup).