# eLibrary Organization



## Prepadoodle (May 28, 2013)

I see a lot of people here are thinking about starting a digital library. As someone who once had over 250,000 books stored digitally, I would like to offer you a few tips. (I have thinned my collection to about 200,000 now)

It's easy to get carried away and just download everything in sight. Resist this temptation! Start by figuring out how you will organize your books. It's real easy to accumulate so many titles that you can't find the one you want when you need it.

I looked at all the typical organizational schemes; Dewey, Library of Congress, etc, etc. and none of them really met my needs. Traditional systems take a lot of effort because you have to figure out what number belongs on each book. Even then, you will have to add this number to the title, which is time consuming and sometimes impossible.

I finally went with the BISG system, which is the system used by most of the big book shops. This is MUCH easier to use than numbered systems. The BISG system had a lot of categories I would never use, and lacked a few I wanted, so I just modified it to suit my needs. Here's a link to the basic categories to get you started... Book Industry Study Group Subject Headings

Once you decide on an organizational scheme, I would suggest adopting a uniform naming scheme. I have 2 schemes, one for fiction and one for non-fiction. All of my fiction files are formatted like this...

Author last name, first name - (date) - title

This automatically groups them by author and sorts within each author group in chronological order.

For non-fiction, I have sub folders set up inside each broad subject. Inside these sub-folders, the naming convention I use is like this...

Title - (date)

I found that this naming convention makes it easy to see if I have duplicates. In many cases, I had multiple editions of the same work, and this let me delete all but the most recent. You might want to keep multiple editions of the same book in some cases, such as in reloading manuals, but usually, you only need the most recent edition.

Once you get all this figured out, download in small batches and process them (put title in your standard format and move them to the right folder or sub-folder) in small batches. Don't download more until you finish a batch. It's usually best to download batches that are all in one category. Work on one section at a time and it goes much faster.

At one point, I had close to 100,000 ebooks just dumped into a single folder. I planned to sort them... one day. I did sort some of them but eventually just decided to delete the folder and take a more reasonable approach in the future.

In summary: have some idea of how you intend to organize before you get too many titles, and adopt a standard naming scheme, then download in manageable batches and sort before you go looking for more.

Hope this helps, and keep collecting!


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## Ralph Rotten (Jun 25, 2014)

You have the digital collection I am working towards. Most cool. I have a pile o' music n porn but am still weak on e-books. I also wanted to run trellis-web on a few hundred websites. There's a lotta great info out there on independant sites that'll be lost when the grid goes down. 

Can you fit all of those books on a single portable device?


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## Prepadoodle (May 28, 2013)

Ralph Rotten said:


> Can you fit all of those books on a single portable device?


Easily. I am using like 230G of a 1 TB portable drive, and have been backing some of it up on SD cards.


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## Ralph Rotten (Jun 25, 2014)

That's awesome. Do you have a lotta medical journals n such? I am weak on medicine and need to start looking for affordable texts. Who knows when you may need to perform an apendectomy with an Xacto*.


*also known in some circles as the Blade of Exact Zero


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## Ralph Rotten (Jun 25, 2014)

Books that should be in your collection:
Pocket Ref by Thomas j Glover
Farmer's Almanac by Benjamin Franklin
Reloading tables, even for calibers you don't have
assorted porn
cookbooks
Improvised Munitions US Army Field Manual
That chemistry book Ash had in his trunk
The Pill Book 13th Edition (to identify meds)
Kama Sutra
Red Dawn


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## Prepadoodle (May 28, 2013)

I have hundreds of medical textbooks. What I do is find an area, then go look for a college course in that area, then look at that course's required books list.

Naturally, I never use illegal torrent sites to gather books, because that would be, you know, wrong.


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## Arklatex (May 24, 2014)

Prepadoodle said:


> I have hundreds of medical textbooks. What I do is find an area, then go look for a college course in that area, then look at that course's required books list.
> 
> Naturally, I never use illegal torrent sites to gather books, because that would be, you know, wrong.


Never thought of that one for some reason. Thanks for the idea. Can you get the digital textbooks free legally?


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## Prepadoodle (May 28, 2013)

Arklatex said:


> Never thought of that one for some reason. Thanks for the idea. Can you get the digital textbooks free legally?


I, ummm, scanned all mine from books I bought. But there are tons of free ebook sites.


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## Prepadoodle (May 28, 2013)

I still have almost the entire US Army medical course in my dropbox. This is a good start, because it contains over 100 books on a wide range of medical topics.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wwymurzf2zpa1km/Medical Courses.zip?dl=0

It's in one big zip folder, so you will have to extract it.


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## James m (Mar 11, 2014)

College students are required to buy text books for a class, and after its over the norm is to either try to sell it back to the college book store, who usually says no because they change editions every year, or sell them on a classified website for the college, sometimes $20 for a book that could have cost $100 to $150 i chose to keep all of my books, i would rather have the reference materials.

Oh and, it may be a good idea to type up a searchable index. maybe a word document. But damn 200,000 books?


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## Prepadoodle (May 28, 2013)

Yeah. It's a chore to organize. 

I started using calibre, which is a free ebook organization tool, but to get the most out of it, you really have to add metatags to make it searchable. I metatagged a hundred books a day for a month or so, then realized I would never finish at that rate.

If you use a good file folder structure, it doesn't take that long to find a particular book though. If your lowest level file folders only contain 10-20 books each, it's easy to find stuff.


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## Prepadoodle (May 28, 2013)

OK, I found the original post from when I first offered the Army medical course books, here's what the zip file contains...

MD 0006 - Basic Human Anatomy
MD 0007 - Basic Human Physiology
MD 0008 - Introduction to Military Preventive Medicine
MD 0010 - Basic Medical Terminology
MD 0064 - Introduction to Radiography
MD 0151 - Principles of epidemiology & Microbiology
MD 0160 - Military Water Supply
MD 0161 - Wastewater Treatment
MD 0162 - Solid Waste Disposal
MD 0170 - Arthropod Identification & Surveys
MD 0171 - Arthropod Control
MD 0172 - Rodent Biology, Survey & Control
MD 0173 - Pesticides in the Military
MD 0353 - Anesthesia Apparatus
MD 0354 - Surgical Dressing Sterilizer
MD 0368 - Laboratory Centrifuge
MD 0370 - Operating Room Table
MD 0373 - Dental Chair (JSA-R)
MD 0501 - Dental Anatomy & Physiology
MD 0502 - Dental Materials
MD 0503 - Dental Instrument Setups
MD 0510 - General Duties of the Dental Specialist
MD 0513 - Preventive Dentistry
MD 0531 - Taking Vital Signs
MD 0532 - Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation
MD 0533 - Treating Fractures in the Field
MD 0534 - Treating Chemical & Biological Agent Casualties
MD 0535 - Communicable Diseases & Field Sanitation
MD 0537 - Decontaminating Casualties
MD 0540 - Sterile Procedures
MD 0542 - Management of Patients with Respiratory Dysfunctions
MD 0547 - Eye, Ear & Nose Injuries
MD 0548 - Environmental Injuries
MD 0549 - Psychosocial Issues
MD 0552 - Administer Intramuscular, Subcutaneous & Intradermal Injections
MD 0553 - Intravenous Infusions & Related Tasks
MD 0554 - Tactical Combat Casualty Care & Wound Treatment
MD 0556 - Basic Patient Care Procedures
MD 0564 - Blood, Electrolytes & Intravenous Infusions
MD 0568 - Respiratory Diseases & Disorders
MD 0569 - Chest & Airway Problems
MD 0571 - Cardiac Impairment
MD 0572 - The Central Nervous System
MD 0574 - Surgical Methods
MD 0575 - Integumentary System
MD 0576 - Wound Care
MD 0577 - The Musculoskeletal System
MD 0579 - The Genitourinary System I
MD 0580 - The Genitourinary System II
MD 0581 - The Gastrointestinal System
MD 0582 - The Sensory System
MD 0583 - The Endocrine System
MD 0584 - Obstetrics & Pediatrics
MD 0586 - Mental Health
MD 0587 - Immunizations & Environmental Injuries
MD 0588 - Environmental Diseases & Injuries I
MD 0589 - Environmental Injuries & Diseases II
MD 0694 - Basic Food Inspection Procedures
MD 0703 - Preservation of Foods
MD 0708 - Food Containers
MD 0710 - Red Meats
MD 0711 - Waterfoods
MD 0712 - Poultry I
MD 0713 - Shell Eggs
MD 0714 - Fresh Fruits & Vegetables
MD 0715 - Dairy
MD 0717 - Storage & Sanitation
MD 0718 - Operational Rations 1
MD 0723 - Food Deterioration
MD 0728 - Poultry II
MD 0801 - Prescription Interpretation
MD 0802 - Pharmaceutical Calculations
MD 0803 - General Chemistry
MD 0804 - Pharmacology I
MD 0805 - Pharmacology II
MD 0806 - Pharmacology III
MD 0807 - Pharmacology IV
MD 0808 - Pharmacology V
MD 0809 - Introduction to Compounding
MD 0811 - Inpatient Dispensing
MD 0841 - Parasitology I
MD 0842 - Parasitology II
MD 0846 - Immunohematology & Blood Banking II
MD 0852 - Urinalysis
MD 0853 - Hematology I
MD 0856 - Bacteriology
MD 0857 - Hematology II
MD 0859 - Mycology
MD 0861 - Clinical Chemistry I
MD 0867 - Blood Donor Operations I
MD 0868 - Blood Donor Operations II
MD 0905 - Nursing Fundamentals I
MD 0906 - Nursing Fundamentals II
MD 0910 - Introduction to Practical Nursing
MD 0913 - Drug Dosage & Therapy
MD 0915 - Nursing Care of the Surgical Patient
MD 0916 - Nursing Care Related to the Musculoskeletal System
MD 0917 - Nursing Care Related to the Cardiovascular & Respiratory Systems
MD 0918 - Nursing Care Related to the Gastrointestinal & Urinary Systems
MD 0919 - Nursing Care Related to the Sensory & Neurological Systems
MD 0921 - Obstetric & Newborn Care I
MD 0922 - Obstetric & Newborn Care II
MD 0923 - Introduction to The Operating Room
MD 0927 - Special Surgical Procedures I
MD 0928 - Special Surgical Procedures II
MD 0933 - Scrub, Gown & Glove Procedures
MD 0935 - Routine Procedures for an Operation


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## Arklatex (May 24, 2014)

Great stuff prepadoodle! I am downloading now.

Do you have a similar file for homesteading?


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## Prepadoodle (May 28, 2013)

Arklatex said:


> Great stuff prepadoodle! I am downloading now.
> 
> Do you have a similar file for homesteading?


Thanks.

No. These and a great many other army manuals are in the public domain, and may be shared freely. Homesteading books aren't usually in the public domain, so shouldn't be shared.

You can always visit a site like archive.org and search collection "texts" for words like "frontier life" or "pioneer" and probably find a lot of great old books on how people used to do it, but these won't take modern technology into account, obviously.

Archive.org has literally millions of ebooks, all free, and most available in multiple formats, but they are all older books.


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## Arklatex (May 24, 2014)

Gotcha. Thanks anyways, I am not up to date on the laws about this stuff. I do know of many sites to download free pdf and have done so. However I would like to see it put up here somewhere in a sticky so everyone can add to it and have an online library.


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