Setting up ISBN Lookup for entering new books

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SETTING UP ISBN LOOKUP FOR ENTERING NEW BOOKS

ISBN Lookup is only applicable if you are using Baslogue to manage a library containing books. ISBN Lookup allows you to retrieve the information for a book using your internet connection, rather than having to type it in yourself - thus saving you a lot of time.

Before you can use this feature you must perform some configuration tasks. This includes creating an account with ISBNdb.com - the online provider that Baslogue uses to lookup ISBNs and retrieve information for books.

To begin the configuration process, select Setup | Display Options from the main menu in the main window. The third tab of this dialog contains the ISBN Lookup settings, which will look like the following:

ISBNdb.com Account Creation

To enable ISBN Lookup, check the "Activate ISBN Lookup" checkbox. This will enable the "New Item Using ISBN Lookup" button on the Catalogue Tab of the main window.

Before you can use ISBN Lookup, you must create an account with ISBNdb.com and obtain an Access Key. To create an account, go to the following webpage and follow the prompts:

https://isbndb.com/account/create.html

Once you have created an account, you will need to follow the links to the "Developer Area, Remote Access API" page, and then to the "Manage Access Keys" page. This should take you to the following page:

https://isbndb.com/account/dev/keys/

Here you will need to "Generate a new key". Once created, enter the key value into the "ISBNdb.com Access Key" field in the Display Options dialog as shown above.

ISBN Data Mapping

Once you have created an account with ISBNdb.com, you need to specify where to place the data that is retrieved by an ISBN Lookup.

The data fields provided by ISBNdb.com are "Title", "Title Long", "Author Info", etc..., as shown in the above dialog. The drop-down boxes allow you to specify which column within the Baslogue Catalogue you wish to place each piece of ISBN data. Not all fields have to be used - you can leave unwanted fields as "(Not Used)".

Note that when entering new items using ISBN Lookup the value that is entered or scanned to perform the lookup is automatically placed into the Barcode ID field. If you are using a barcode scanner, this will generally be the same as the "ISBN-13" value, so you probably won't want to place this value in any other field. This is why in the above example it is specified as Not Used.

The column names which are shown in the drop-down boxes are those which have been set in the preceding "Catalogue Columns" tab within the Display Options dialog. An example of the Catalogue Columns tab is shown below - this example matches the ISBN Lookup example shown above.

For a detailed description on using ISBN Lookup to create new items see Entering New Items Using ISBN Lookup.