I'm running my own library, eh
Update notes on my running-my-own-library scheme:
If you're here in #YEG, particularly around the Parkallen area, feel free to pop on over to https://lib.keithzg.ca and see if there's anything you'd like to borrow, especially if you can't find it at EPL. You'll have to personally ask me to set up an account to actually borrow anything, but my own library and that of participating friends is searchable without a login (at least for now, until the LLM bots get too bad). Just note that we haven't exactly been diligent yet about which books we're okay with lending out, so you might ask and get denied 馃槄 .
I'm aghast to find out that "real" libraries purge bibliographic records of books they no longer have. Wtf?! I pledge to have my database only grow over time, it's just text, so far well over a thousand records and I've even included a bunch of book cover images and it's ~25MB, that's like the first few seconds of a video. Why do librarians apparently love destroying information?!
The excuse I've heard is that there's central repositories of such info. I could rant for a day about how bad of a rationalization that is, but it also just doesn't seem to be sufficient in practice.
Relatedly, I'm sorry but I'm really gonna have to say USA > Canada for national public bibliographic records, the Library Of Congress has a completely open API endpoint I can use with this software to query for bibliographical info on books while Library And Archives Canada does not; it seems like they used to, but discontinued public access and you now need to pay them or be a full "real" library. This is particularly silly since they do let you web-search the same info in big HTML pages with lots of graphics and CSS and JS and all that, which must cost them far more than each API request via the Z39.50 or SRU protocols would.
Relatedly to that, Red Deer Public Library, you rule; Edmonton Public Library, you drool! But also the best library I've yet found in terms of having a records server I can set my Koha install up to query is the Library of Michigan, once again America beats Canada for public access to book info, tsk tsk Canada...