[tomcooke]

I have a large library(almost 53000 books) which I am trying to organize. I would like one library to hold everything but specialized libraries to hold specific books. I also want to update each of the seperate libraries with any new books plus update the main library. Additionally there is metadata maintenance that needs to be done which is very slow in the main library (several seconds to same per change). Ideally I would like to create small libraries to make metadata changes and then merge those back into the main library.

Is what I describe possible?
What is the best method to accomplish this? Copy out the books and create a new library with them then merge back into the main library? Do I have to delete these books out of the main library when they are split off because the metadata changes might make them look like different books?
or
is it better to do all the work in the main library using a filter to limit the active book view so things work faster and no merging needed later?

This is going to be a lot of work to get really organized so any help at this stage will be greatly appreciated.

Thomas