One person's shelves of books: of them, read from photographs of the shelves, identified one by one, linked to reference sources where a match could be confirmed, and arranged so anyone can find what's there. A short wishlist sits alongside.
This is the working library of the person who makes these catalogues, shown as it is in use, with nothing removed. The books still waiting to be identified are left in, marked, because finding them is part of the work. The synopses and edition notes are placeholders; see “How this was made” below.
Each book shows what's known about it at a glance. Open its synopsis, follow its reference link, or add notes of your own.
How many books fall under each genre, as they were sorted when the shelves were read.
The wishlist that sits beside the library: books not yet on the shelves, each with a note on which edition is worth finding.
Each shelf was photographed and every spine read and written down: title, author, and a first guess at genre, with a note on how sure the reading was. Spines that couldn't be read were still listed, as a description, so nothing on the shelf goes missing.
Each book was matched against public reference sources. A link counts as confirmed only when the title and the author both agree; a weaker match is kept but marked. Anything corrected by hand stays corrected.
The library is a working one: books are added, uncertain ones are confirmed and drop off the “still to identify” list, and each has room for its owner's notes. This page is a snapshot of it.
The photographs of these shelves were read with the help of a cloud AI service. In a client's catalogue, anything drawn from the client's own record is read on systems under the practice's control, or by hand; it is never sent to a cloud AI service.
The synopses and edition notes here marked as placeholders were drafted by AI, to show where that text would sit; a sample of them was checked against published descriptions. A client's catalogue would use a licensed reference work, credited, or text written by the person making the catalogue. No passage in anything delivered to a family is drafted by a text generator.
The identifying, the checking against reference sources, the arrangement and the notes field are the kind of work this catalogue is meant to show.