Creating and using external metadata

[Bruce@DrBuz.com]

For the last several years I have collected Spanish Textbooks with the idea of creating a library tool using Calibre as the reader device. It was more successful than I expected. Now with several thousand titles.

In the process I have created specific title selections at the request of a specific school with their requested books.

The practical problem is that it takes a long time to go through the individual files to code the metadata needed to present the books in a useful manner. As the requests grows it becomes more time consuming to update files with unique metadata for each school.

What is desired is to be able to create an external database (Spreadsheet) that would allow metadata to be easily updated for any or all of the new titles or schools in one place. That would mean I wouldn't have to open multiple file, rather just update the spread sheet which contained all the variations and metadata in one place, making it much easier to edit.

If a new file set could be made (based on the metadata) and then either directly imported, or copied into Calibre, that solve a host of issues,

Anyone else facing this issue? Any ideas? Any suggestions?
Thanks for your time and replies
Dr. Buz

[BetterRed]

@Bruce@DrBuz.com - the Import List plugin may do what you want

This plugin allows you to match existing or create empty books in calibre based on lists of books from external sources. For some users it may be they want to import an existing list of their own reading/books, for others it can be that they want to import lists of bestsellers, popular books, genre recommendations, award winners and so on.

BR