Guidance with library

[Tadario]

Hi Everyone,

I'm trying to decide on what way is the best way of importing books.
I have about 15.000 titles (and growing) of a mixture of ebooks, comics etc that I would like to add to Calibre.
However I'm unsure if I'm better off splitting my collection into multiple libraries or if I should just keep a single larger library.

Would someone be so kind as to explain the pro's and con's of each solution ?

Thanks!

[theducks]

Some Reasons for separate :

Limit Access (eg PG-13 ) needed
Custom columns are different (types or allowed values)
{Wider is slower Lean, mean, (in)columns machine}

But since Import only creates (populates) a basic metadata

Import to an Intake Library and plan on moving (sorting to which) them to another one later using "Copy to Library" (on the context menu). This is quick and painless

[Tadario]

Alright thank you very much for your explanation theducks I really appreciate it

[BetterRed]

@Tadario - I keep books, comics, journals, and media in a separate libraries. For me at least, the custom columns I have for each is too disparate to consider having them in the same physical library - even with Virtual Libraries and Managed Views.

Like theducks, I use a separate Intake library. For books I do whatever it takes to get the ISBN, Authors and Title 100% correct. Similarly for the other libraries - get the essential data right first. Before I do the Copy to Library step I use the Find library duplicates function of the Find Duplicates plugin to weed out any duplicates.

I also find it useful to have Test libraries in which to experiment. And for similar reasons I keep a recent version of Calibre Portable on hand. Not sure if the equivalent can be done on OS/X or Linux as easily as it can on Windows.

Aside - the Copy to Library function can be added to the main, or any other Toolbar via Preferences->Toolbars, i.e. you are not forced to use the context menu, it just happens to be there by default, along with a bunch of other things which can also popped into an iron toolbar.

BR

[Tadario]

BetterRed: I'm currently in the process of adding all my books to a library, after which I will probably do a download metadata etc.
Unfortunately with that many books the import is fairly long (expecting several days)

Correct me if I misunderstood you, but you do an import/adding of books to a library, then you look for duplicates, add your custom columns tags and then you copy them to your main library ?

Thanks

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Tadario

BetterRed: I'm currently in the process of adding all my books to a library, after which I will probably do a download metadata etc.
Unfortunately with that many books the import is fairly long (expecting several days)

Correct me if I misunderstood you, but you do an import/adding of books to a library, then you look for duplicates, add your custom columns tags and then you copy them to your main library ?

Thanks

Custom Columns are already there (Intake), even if they are empty. What you may do, is populate the field.

Find Duplicates PI can look in the Same Library (split up of format types is common) Yo can M(erge) those.
Find Duplicates can also look at another Library. What it won't tell you is you have EPUB here and a Mobi there

You have the Picture as BR and I do it (only what gets done inside varies )

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by theducks

Find Duplicates can also look at another Library. What it won't tell you is you have EPUB here and a Mobi there

@Tadario - I overcome this either by having the target library accessible via a server task, or by using my file manager to look in the target library book folder. I often get duplicates my Media library, but only rarely in the others.

Because of the custom column disparity between target libraries, my Intake library only has two custom columns - Admin Tags and Last Action Date, which are common to all the target libraries. I put 'New' into Admin Tags, and current timestamp into Last Action. If I can accurately populate standard columns, such as Publisher, Published Date and Languages, whilst a 'book' is in the Intake library I do so. My objective is to get things in and out of Intake ASAP.

BR