print spine labels?

I want to print DDS spine labels.

I do not see anything on the site to facilitate doing so.

I can export my library to Xcel, but the calculated DDS numbers disappear. I can make them permanent by kliking and saving, but must I klik each one to do so?

Suggestions?

First, are you sure it's the DDS numbers you're missing and not the LCC numbers? Scanning over my library, I see most of the books have "black" DDS numbers, and mostly green LCC numbers. That's imported from Amazon, so you may have different results.

Second, I too had a grand plan to do the same thing, and then organize my books accordingly. In principle, I too would like the option to export the non-official data, possibly marked as to whether it's official or not.

That said, on reviewing the Dewey numbers attached to the books, they result in a very poor grouping of books, so not much use for my purposes anyway.

(If you'd like to see the effect on your own list of books, you can set one of the catalog listing views to include the Dewey column, then sort on that.)

What a great idea to sort by dewey! We had a long heated argument about whether to sort by DDS or "used bookstore method" and we ended up coming up with our own system instead, but never actually tried sorting by DDS. You're right--it makes our collection into nonsense. Glad we didn't go all out on it (we were planning on doing labels and everything too).

Well, I ~did~ just that. Scrounged for Dewey Numbers for most of our almost 1,800 books, sorted them by Dewey, and then arranged them accordingly. They're now in at least some sort of non-random order. And yes, it otherwise doesn't work well. Books that (in my mind) are completely, totally related are in five different rooms now, but at least I know where to find them.

I've been researching other methods, and still haven't found anything I like better. If you happen upon one, please let me know.

Why on earth would anyone want to use Dewey? The Library of Congress system is much more comprehensive and much better organized -- and all United States' universities use it.

>5 nathanielcampbell:
All?

Well, any university that has even a half-way decent library, e.g. a million volumes or more. With that many books, Dewey becomes impractical -- the LC system has far greater precision.

Re: #5 & #7

You sound like an LC bigot.
In fact, slightly more than half of all colleges and universities use Dewey as the primary system, with variances in how they deal with Fiction and a few other genres.

I'm no lover of Dewey; don't get me wrong. It was the easiest to implement.

I used Dewey because I had far more Dewey numbers in the LT catalog (and my own spreadsheet) than I did LC numbers. I also had available to me every night, the Dewey Catalog index (the blue book), whereas trying to determine the LC number would have been a nightmare, as I had only the uppermost levels of it readily available to me.

LC is based on the Jeffersonian System. which was designed to catalog the books available at the time of The Enlightenment -- not necessarily a whole lot better than Dewey when you look at the books I've got.

Whatever system I end up using, I'm still going to have to keep referring to my computer to see where a book is located.

I spent 13 years in public primary and secondary schools learning Dewey, and then when I got to college, it was useless, because my university (and all the other universities in the city--Boston) used LC. You may be right that "slightly more than half of all colleges and universities use Dewey", but the half that use LC appear, at least in my experience, to be the upper half: Boston College, Harvard, Notre Dame, Univ. of Chicago, Northwestern, the Univ. of California libraries, ...

Of course, I will concede that both systems are far superior to the myriad of labyrinthine systems I had to navigate when working in Europe. Accession date and size may be easy and have made sense in medieval libraries when working with usually no more than a few hundred volumes, but someone really needs to let the great libraries of Europe know that it's time to change to something a little more user-friendly.

And sorry if I came off as a snob -- it's just that, after working with both (as a summer service project in high school I catalogued our church library of ca. 2500 volumes by hand into a Microsoft Access database, using one of the blue books to which you refer), I find LC to be far more expansive in its possibilities. Of course, as a medievalist, an Enlightenment-era system also tends to work just fine for most of my books. To each his own, I suppose...

#9
My husband and I have had this discussion a lot, especially when I told him that I had organized my books at home by DDS. He guffawed and wanted to know who used such a system anymore, since his local public library was LC.

And to be fair, Harvard's system is some homebrew of LC and old Harvard call numbers. I think they're still in the process of recataloging.

Still do not know about printing labels...any thoughts?

Look here for an Excel solution I worked out.

Hello, Mike. I'm cataloging a collection for the Nonprofit Center of Milwaukee. I'd like to know more about your Excel solution for printing labels. Any chance you have printed directions you would be willing to share?

>13 NonprofitMKE: I'm not sure if WHL is currently active - I hope so but I haven't come across him for a while.

Did you pick up the link on the word "here" in >12 WholeHouseLibrary:? If not there is some information you may find helpful in WHL's post and another a couple of places lower on that old thread.

Exactly. The LOC system is far superior to the DDS.