What’s Been Keeping Me Busy: A Book Collection Database in Obsidian

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A while back I mentioned on Twitter that I wanted to catalog all of the books in my collection. I was looking for the best tool to do the job the way I wanted to do it. (I tend to have very specific requirements in this regard). Then last week, I mentioned on Twitter that I had been spending time writing fairly sophisticated Javacript code for Obsidian’s Tempalter plug-in:

Yesterday, in a fit of creativity, I spent much of the day writing code for some sophisticated Templater functionality for @obsdmd. Once I have things working, I’ll post more about it. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/ARIoS4c0VY

— Jamie Todd Rubin (@jamietr) October 9, 2022

The net result is that for the past 3 weeks, I have been writing a ton of code for the Templater plug-in that would support my ability to have my entire book collection database stored in plain text files in Obsidian in a way that meets my own personal requirements.

Within the next week or so, I’ll have a much more detailed post on this. I’ll discuss what my requirements were, and how I came to land on Obsidian as the master database for my book collection. I’ll talk about data entry (which my code is designed to dramatically speed up) and I’ll use a single shelve of books as an example of what I have been able to achieve so far. I’ll also make my code available on GitHub to anyone who wants to use it.

Just wanted you all to know why I have been so quiet here the last few weeks. You can expect some (hopefully!) good stuff about managing my book collection and reading lists in Obsidian coming soon.

Have a great week!

Written on October 17, 2022.

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