[kacir]

Originally Posted by greenrun

Hello all ... I'm relatively new to the forum and to Calibre, yet I've inherited the task of setting up a Calibre library for a fairly large collection of eBooks. We have a collection of several thousand eBooks in all different formats on a wide range of topics within the company. Can someone suggest three or four key posts that I should read to help build a good foundation for our library files?

A couple of key questions:

1) Do I organize the files first, then add to Calibre or just add them and then clean-up organization and metadata?

2) How crucial is the file structure of the eBooks prior to adding them to Calibre? Is it difficult to change the location and hierarchical position of a book once in Calibre?

It depends.
Just start adding the books to the library. You can add columns and configure things later.
Much depends on how good the metadata associated with the book files are. If you are lucky and you have most of books with a good metadata, just drag & drop them into Calibre.
You are extremely lucky, because adding of large numbers of books to a large library just (five days ago as of writing this post) got significantly faster in the latest version of Calibre - 2.10.
There is new version of Calibre available every Friday. It often brings significant improvements - like last one did.

If your metadata is not so good, it depends on how the book files themselves are named. If you have them named following way: AuthorName AuthorSurname - series # - title you just install plugin "Quick preferences" and use built in "patterns" - regular expressions - to recognize book name and authors. Do explore pattern, or template or regular expression for adding books in preferences. "Quick preferences" is just a quick way to switch between several options when adding books so you do not have to dive deep into preferences dialog panel. At this moment it is broken a little bit - the first book you add after changing settings is added with the old settings.

If your books are not so conveniently named, you might have them in directories that contain author name and other valuable info. If that is the case, get a listing of file names including complete path and ask some Unix administrator or DOS commandline guru to help you to write a [shell] script to copy books to a new filenames that contain all the info you can process them using template for adding books described above.

Learn what Regular expressions are, because they are an extremely powerful tool for importing books, searching library, changing 'surname, name' author name to 'name surname' and lots of other things. You do not want to rename 500 authors manually, do you?
The best book to learn about Regular expressions is "Mastering regular expressions". Remember, you do not have to be a master to do some powerful things. Calibre is written in Python, so you are interested in learning Python type of RE.

Bear in mind that you can search for books using regular expressions. So it you write in the search bar Authors:"=Stephen King" you get books with EXACT match. When you type Authors:"King" you get also manes like Hawking - so you are looking for a substring. You can also search like this: Authors:"~King" where word King in this example represents Regular expressions. Look up this in Calibre Documentation on the net - you have to escape backslash [you might have no idea what I am talking about - read about Regular expressions first". There is wonderful thread about Rebular expressions in Calibre here, I will try to find it later.]

Get plugin for downloading metadata. You import a book, with just author and name and then hit <Ctrl>D and Calibre will find and download other metadata for the book - this works extremely well for fiction and is well worth the try for your books.

Get plugin for finding duplicates - this will help you locate many, many duplicates in your library much more quickly than manual search.

Read the Calibre manual thoroughly.

Read monster thread about Calibre written by Unbogling. (I will try to find that one later as well and post link).

Get an SSD for your library and operating system, if possible. You are going to do this at work and saved minutes when doing large changes to your libraries will quickly add up to pay 400 Eur you pay for a really fancy 1TB Crucial M550 many times over. A modest 120GB SSD to start with is just about 60Eur and there is absolutely no reason not to use at least that in professional environment.

BACKUP your library often - this is where your SSD will really shine once you have tens of thousands of books. Copying many thousands of files scattered all over disk anywhere - even to a network storage - is an extremely I/O intensive operation and this is where SSD is the king. Backup your library especially before bulk renaming authors using regular expressions and other large changes. Do not overwrite previous backups, it might turn out that some bulk change you did a week ago had some nasty side-effect.

Calibre will not touch your original files, it will create its own file structure. Treat is as a black box and access your books using only Calibre. The file structure comes into play only when a disaster strikes and you need to recover your books manually or do something desperate. There are *many* threads discussing this.

Learn how to start Calibre server from within Calibre - so your coworkers can access the library using just a web browser (it has to be able to see the IP address of your Calibre server - on the intranet or fixed IP on the net.)

Have a look at CalibreCompanion app for Android - this is great way of how to access library form a tablet or a phone.

Consider persuading your company to donate some money for the development of Calibre. The author of Calibre Kovid Goyal works on Calibre full time and improves [and supports] the program at an incredible rate. I have seen many great and/or expensive pieces of software, and Calibre is perhaps the best one regarding rate of improvement, user support, friendliness, promptness of fixing bugs or adding requested features. Plus, its powerful features will save you many, MANY man/hours.