westcoastmilt
commented
8 years ago I just tried to find the info on the book "The Martian". The openlibrary.org didn't return any thing. Then I found another api: https://www.googleapis.com/books/v1/volumes?q=isbn:9781101905005. Also, I tried to find the older book "The Tale of Tom Kitten" and it didn't work with googleapi but did with openlibrary.org. So looks like we need both APIs to find book information.
In mongo db libraries collection we could add a field called books. The list of books would consist of a two field object: bar code number and type of bar code (EAN_13, UPC_A...). The bar code number comes from Zxing bar scanner. For book information we can use something like: https://openlibrary.org/api/books?bibkeys=ISBN:9780723234920&callback=mycallback&jscmd=data This site only works with EAN_13 bar codes and the jscmd=data request returns title, author, classification, cover images, number of pages, published date and other information. From classification the genre can be determined using the dewey decimal number. We can load a collection to map dewey decimal number to genre. For cases where the openlibrary doesn't find the book, such as UPC_A codes, we can provide the user the option to enter these fields manually. Also, sometimes openlibrary is missing data, such as classification. When a field is missing we can provide the steward the option to enter the missing data (like genre). It might be good to track missing data in another collection and be another lookup option for hard to find information like UPC_A bar coded books.