Printing catalog books for your meeting library from LibraryThing

Hi, Friends--

Some monthly meetings don't have a computer, and I have been asked to figure out how to print catalog books from LibraryThing. It looks like one can print a very nice-looking set of catalog books. Many years ago, there was a time when many libraries used big catalog books instead of catalog card files. There were always three of them--one listing everything by author, another for items listed by title, and then a subject heading list.

If any of you have tried this, please share any tips you have for making the lists come out super user friendly, etc.

Thanks in advance. --Rita Varley

Yes, I was thinking of this too- do you mean printing out an exported Excel file? or is catalog books something else? We have an old card catalog, but it is not worth updating at this point, and making cards for new books would be far too labor intensive.

Have any of you tried putting a widget or search box on your meeting's website? I want to try that once I've got things well-cataloged here.

Michael North, Friends Meeting of Washington

I export to Excel and do some cleanup work and re-sorting to come up with two lists: an author list and a title list. I've only done this twice so far, so I've yet come up with an "easy" way to do it. Excel does not ignore the articles "A", "An", and "The", so I go through and delete those and re-sort. Our Meeting webmaster has put a button on our website that leads to our LibraryThing page. I leave the search function to LibraryThing. It does a fine job of findings words, titles, authors, etc. in the various fields.

You can also use the "Show Printable Catalog" button. (Select the "Your Books" view, then look for the printer icon second from the right on the toolbar.) You can sort the resulting list by heading before you print it. I like to print it to a PDF file, which allows me to apply page numbers and running headers.

My problem with this method is that it prints a note on each page that says "* Green text is "calculated" text. Calculated text is provided when ...." It also prints a running footer that gives the URL of the LibraryThing catalog, which is somewhat less annoying and which I could live with.

I get better results by exporting to an Excel file, then cleaning that file up. However it is more work to do it that way.

If someone could tell us how to get rid of the "Green text" note on the bottom of each page of the printed output, I would be most grateful.