Library database success story
August 22, 2025 at 10:34 PM by Dr. Drang
As I said back in June, one of my goals for my library search system (recently updated) was to be able to check on whether I already owned a book while in a used bookstore. I got to use it for that very purpose a couple of days ago, and it worked just as I hoped.
I saw a copy of Cornelius Lanczos’s The Variational Principles of Mechanics at a local used book store. In good shape and at a good price. This is a book I’ve known about for 40 years and one that’s very well known. It’s not the book that was assigned for the class I took on energy methods—that was Henry Langhaar’s Energy Methods in Applied Mechanics, a wonderful book that I’ve referred to throughout my career—but it was one that I’ve always thought I should own.
The problem was, as I stood there in the bookstore, that I couldn’t remember whether I’d ever followed through on that thought. Out came my phone. I brought up the search page, authenticated myself, and searched for “Lanczos.” Zero results. On the off-chance his name included some diacritical marks that weren’t on the book itself, I also searched for “Variational.” Still no hits, so I bought the book and added it to the system. Now it’s on my shelf and a search on his name returns this:
Would it have been a tragedy if I spent ten dollars on a second copy of a book I already owned? No. Did I spend more than ten dollars worth of effort building my library search system? Absolutely. But the satisfaction I got having the system work exactly as I’d hoped was priceless.