Loan History

[dunhill]

How would you manage a loan history in Calibre?
I have these columns: title, author, series, tags, loan date, due date, return date, user, and a column for the difference in days that alerts me if the return date is exceeded.

For the history, I thought I'd add a note for the user.

[Sirtel]

What do you mean? Library loans? What repayment? What users?

[dunhill]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

What do you mean? Library loans? What repayment? What users?

It wasn't a refund date, it was a return date.
It is a project for a school

[Bradles]

Use TinyCat: "The online library catalog for small libraries, powered by LibraryThing."

I'm not affiliated, but as a developer I'd recommend a fit-for-purpose tool at $3/month, rather than reinvent the wheel.

[DNSB]

One corporation I dealt with switched to TinyCat from their older and more expensive library management system. It worked well for their needs. One of their techs looked at calibre but it was and is not intended for a system where multiple people are borrowing books, some of those books having lending restrictions while others don't. The cost of having a Python guru level programmer modify it was well beyond their budget.

[dunhill]

Originally Posted by DNSB

One corporation I dealt with switched to TinyCat from their older and more expensive library management system. It worked well for their needs. One of their techs looked at calibre but it was and is not intended for a system where multiple people are borrowing books, some of those books having lending restrictions while others don't. The cost of having a Python guru level programmer modify it was well beyond their budget.

Thank you all very much for your advice.
And as @DNSB comments, one of the difficulties I've seen is precisely this, and that's why I have my question: Keeping a record in a book of who the book was loaned to and on what date.

[Terisa de morgan]

I would do, more or less, as I'm doing with my reading history:

• User/Loan Date/... Fields you need for current loan
• Action chains to move user and important dates to another field (adding as note or some columns you can search) after the loan is returned. For example, something like: user1: 2025/03/24 - 2025/03/30;user2: 2025/03/20 - 2025/04/02

If you set user as a tag-like column, you can query at any moment, which are the books a use has loaned (I guess you've already thought about this, but it's an easy way to control number of loans).

[dunhill]

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

I would do, more or less, as I'm doing with my reading history:

• User/Loan Date/... Fields you need for current loan
• Action chains to move user and important dates to another field (adding as note or some columns you can search) after the loan is returned. For example, something like: user1: 2025/03/24 - 2025/03/30;user2: 2025/03/20 - 2025/04/02

If you set user as a tag-like column, you can query at any moment, which are the books a use has loaned (I guess you've already thought about this, but it's an easy way to control number of loans).

That might work! I hadn't thought of it that way; I was thinking of adding a note per user, but I'd have to query the notes.
The way you're suggesting it, I could see it from the tag explorer.
Thanks for the tip!

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by dunhill

How would you manage a loan history in Calibre?
I have these columns: title, author, series, tags, loan date, due date, return date, user, and a column for the difference in days that alerts me if the return date is exceeded.

For the history, I thought I'd add a note for the user.

As others have written, Calibre is really a repository of ebooks, not a library system in the sense that the software public libraries, video rental, Kindle Unlimited, or Kobo Plus etc use to manage subscribers/borrowers.

I've written that kind of software, which has a subscriber database as well as the book/magazine/video/LP/CD catalogues. You can of course kludge it in Calibre using extra custom columns, but it doesn't make sense. For physical loans you also want to integrate barcodes or RF-ID tags.

I'd not use anything other than Calibre to manage my ebooks, but I'd use a real lending-library system for loans/borrows & subscribers, not Calibre.