Similar dealings with unlinked books/audiobooks

Books CLZ Books Web
1

I just arrived at the same or at least similar unresolved topic about Dealing with Unlinked Books. After a larger import by text file, I have about 200 titles left on the Link Books page, some still from an earlier import because I just didn’t know how to delete those.

  1. I found that I could populate the unlinked books by going to the respective books through the Folder method or Edit through the List view. So I fixed up most of the unlinked files in that other location.
  2. However, in the Link Books page, the list is still there, and if I am not mistaken, the unlinked books are now looking like my fixed-up files (I can tell by the cover pages). And on the right side, I am still supposed to Accept or Manually Link the Suggestions provided by the system.
  3. I don’t really want to do it because these suggestions are not exact matches and would require more and repeated manual editing to each file I already fixed. In addition, the other half of the files cannot be found in the system or do not match at all.
  4. Also, I made a related observation in a previous import that sometimes when I fix up a file like mentioned above in the other location, the file actually disappeared from the Link Booklist page. But i have no idea what I did to make this happen or if I was just imagining it.
  5. My resolution would be if I can get rid of the Suggested Link Matches on the right side without endangering my imported books on the left side.
  6. Help :melting_face:
2

Hi Mainzer,

What would you really want here?

  • Do you want to remove the 200 unlinked books from the entire database?

  • Or do you want to keep them and fix them at some point?

If the latter, just ignore the Link screen, easy.

Want to see those unlinked books in your collection list?

  • In List view, click the columns button at the top.
  • Now add CLZ Books ID as a column
  • Now save
  • Now click the column header for CLZ Books ID to make it sort by that so you can easily find all those books without a CLZ Books ID.
3

I DO NOT want to remove them, I want to keep them as they are now and give them this Core ID. Accepting the Suggestions on the Link Books page would add new, irrelevant ,or wrong data or even overwrite the current data in those files.

Is deleting those files first required to make them disappear on the Link Books page? If yes, would it work if I duplicate all these files I want to keep, and then delete the first set? Would the duplicates have a Core ID?

4

Hold up though.

Why do you want them gone from the Link screen? Is it because you “never want to link them with Core anyway”?

You don’t have to give all books Core IDs (a Core ID means it is linked with a book in Core, to give you data, and that is all, if you add data yourself and no Core ID, everything will just keep working.

5

I import a lot by text file and the list on the Link Book page can get VERY long, though I am probably pretty much done for this method now.

  1. Importing by text file is quicker if you have an updated spreadsheet to cut and paste the needed info into a template to create that text file. Then you just click on the imported file in the Link Book page to link it to something in the core. However, you still have to go into the file to adjust it to what you actually have, like no ISBN, a different format (book vs audiobook), edition, cover page, etc.
  2. When there is no match, or a match that requires to edit a lot in a single file, or you are getting tired to sit at the desk and want to continue on your couch using the mobile app, then you can have a lot of unmatched files left and the list becomes longer and longer with each import. You can’t get to the Link Book page from the mobile app.
  3. The mistake I made was to edit the files from the inside, not from the Link Book page. So out of my 200 files still on the Link Book page, I had already fixed more than 100 files that are final. While those changes were also reflected on the Link Book page (they all of a sudden had all the nice cover pages that I had applied), the fixed files were still in the list. And if I want to get rid of the list (it’s very long), I would have to accept the suggested matches. But now, these matches are even less matching than before. When accepting, they add the info from that matching file and provide info that I would have to delete again. They also seem to overwrite some fields and I would have to remember what it looked like before. Batch editing is not possible because each file has different info.
  4. I did 2 more imports last night where the files were popular audiobooks. None of them were imported by themselves, I had to manually link each one. But because they were popular titles, I could find quickly an acceptable version in the database.
  5. I have now only about 30 or so files left that I need to match because it will take time to find the exact title/version/part. I will do those later.
  6. I could ignore the leftover files in the list, but it looks like I am not finished. It just doesn’t look clean. Sorry, I am a little picky.
  7. And in case you wonder why I don’t use the ISBN, when I started my collections over 50 years ago, there either were no ISBNs yet or I cut them off the packaging because they looked ugly. I just needed the pretty picture.:blush: Who would have known that I ever would need ISBNs!.
  8. And again I learned something new about identifying unlinked books from the List View, that is, I didn’t realize that there was something like an Object ID. I just love this software. I am already using my movie mobile app to pick movies to watch.:star_struck: :star_struck: :star_struck: Now I just have the real books to go. They are old, but I know that most of them will have ISBNs.

Thank you for all your help and explaining in a way I understand!

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