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Catalogue by scanning

When a crate of books arrives, scan cataloguing is the fastest way to record everything: you scan the ISBNs one after another with the camera, and BibliOfelia creates the records and their copies in one go.

It is, for creation, the equivalent of inventory for checking: a continuous scan, with nothing to click between two books.

What a cataloguing session is for

A cataloguing session (also called a batch) is how you add many books at once to the catalogue. It works in three steps:

  1. You open a batch and scan every book in the crate, one after another. Nothing enters the catalogue yet: the batch is only a working list, which you can correct or empty.
  2. You check the list — and above all, you apply batch changes: tick several rows (or all of them) and assign them, in a single click, the same classification, the same location in the library or the same condition. That is the whole point of cataloguing together books that belong together.
  3. You send the batch to the catalogue: records and copies are created for real, and you can print the labels for that batch only in one go.

A validated batch stays available: from the list of batches, View batch shows which books it contained, with a link to each record.

Start a cataloguing batch

From the Catalogue (or Advanced → Inventory), click Catalogue by scanning, then New batch.

Before scanning, you can set default values for the whole batch:

  • a default classification (Youth Non-fiction, Adult Fiction…);
  • a default location (the shelf these books will go to);
  • a label to find the batch again later.

These values apply to every book in the batch, but you can change them line by line afterwards.

Scan the ISBNs in a row

  1. Click Start scanning: the camera opens in continuous mode.
  2. Scan the ISBN barcode on the back of each book (it starts with 978 or 979).
  3. On each read, a beep confirms and the line appears in the list: BibliOfelia automatically looks up the title, author and language (OpenLibrary, Google Books, BnF…).
  4. While scanning, the screen shows the title and author found — or, failing that, the ISBN and language.

Several copies of the same book

Got two identical copies? Scan the same ISBN twice. On the second pass (after a few seconds), BibliOfelia shows "copy 2" in large type: it will add an extra copy to the same record, without creating a duplicate. A re-scan that is too quick (less than 3 seconds) is ignored, to avoid double reads.

Ofelia codes rejected

Cataloguing accepts book ISBNs (978/979) and magazine ISSNs (977, see below). If you mistakenly scan an Ofelia code label (290/291) already on a document, it is rejected: here you record new documents, not copies that are already catalogued.

Cataloguing a magazine or journal

Magazines and journals have no ISBN, but an ISSN: a barcode that starts with 977. No separate tool needed — scan that 977 barcode in the same batch as your books.

  • BibliOfelia recognises the ISSN and looks up the magazine's title (BnF, BNE).
  • All issues of the same magazine share the same ISSN: they therefore land on a single "magazine" record, to which each scanned issue adds a copy.

One ISSN = a single magazine record

If you scan two different issues of the same magazine, BibliOfelia does not create two records: it adds a copy to the magazine's record. To tell the issues apart (date, number), note them in the copy's notes.

Check and adjust the batch

When you press Finish, the batch list appears. For each line, you see the book found (author, title, language) and you can:

  • change the classification, location or condition — per line, or for several lines at once using the checkboxes and the Select all button;
  • adjust the number of copies;
  • delete a line (trash icon) in case of a scan error.

Record already exists

If an ISBN matches a book already present in the catalogue, BibliOfelia does not recreate the record: it simply adds your new copies to the existing record, without changing it.

Save the batch

Click Save the batch. BibliOfelia creates all the missing records and all the copies, with their Ofelia codes.

Each copy created is attached to its cataloguing batch. So when printing labels, you can filter on this exact batch: only what you have just recorded is offered (and pre-checked), without pulling out the whole library. See Book labels.

See also