A number of people over the last year or so have asked for the ability to do cross-library duplicate comparisons. I've finally reached the breaking point of deciding a personal need for using it myself and have put something together.
So on the menu you now have a "Find library duplicates..." option with a screen that looks similar to the regular Find book duplicates one. However you can see you choose a library to compare against up the top, and have way less options at the bottom since UI stuff isn't relevant.
As I have stated previously the only practical approach to working with the results is to simply produce a report. You can copy it to your clipboard / text editor, switch to your other library and manually decide what to do about them. It would be an *enormous* amount of work to wrap a cross-library gui for merging/deleting so it isn't going to happen - we discounted having a special plugin screen when originally designing this plugin and the reasons more than equally apply here.
A couple more things to note:
- The report only shows the results of comparing books in the current library with books in the target library. It intentionally will not show you duplicates that exist only in the current library, nor duplicates that exist only in the target library. It is for a direct cross-library comparison only.
- If you do an "Ignore Title" search (i.e. matching only authors) then the report output will differ and show you by author name which authors match and the books associated with that author in the target library
- If you do a binary search, it shows you which format is the binary duplicate
- For title/author/isbn searches, it will show you what formats if any exist for that book
- Unlike "Find book duplicates", it is possible with "Find library duplicates" to do an Ignore Title, Identical Author search. This is a combination which makes no sense when only looking in your own library, but makes perfect sense when comparing across libraries.
I haven't even had a chance to run this on my libraries at home as yet so it may have gremlins. I have run it against some small test libraries and it all seems to do the right thing but any feedback is appreciated.