Setting up ISBN Lookup for entering new books

Baslogue^{^®}

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. The ISBN Lookup data is sourced from Open Library - for further information see https://openlibrary.org/about.

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:

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.

ISBN Data Mapping

You need to specify where to place the data that is retrieved by an ISBN Lookup.

The data fields provided by Open Library are "Title", "Subtitle", "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.

If you map the "OpenLibrary Key" to a catalolgue column, then this key value is stored with the book. Then, on the Catalogue Tab a URL will appear beneath the list of books, with a clickable link to "http://openlibrary.org/books/...". Clicking this link will launch your default web browser and load the page with full details for this book.

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