Book titles and ISBN numbers

Before you can add books to the system, you have to make the system aware of the various book titles and maybe their other metadata such as Subtitle, Author, Publisher,… but most importantly, their ISBN numbers. Each book title and edition has an unique ISBN number, which is usually found printed on the back of the book in a barcode format. Note that some books with the same title may have different ISBN numbers even though they may look exactly the same. This ISBN barcode can be scanned by a barcode scanner to make easier and faster to enter the ISBN number into a database.

BookTrack has the ability to automatically look up a textbooks metadata from an online database, but some times a publisher may use an ISBN number on a title, but they have not yet registered the book title with the ISBN database. In these cases you will have to add the textbook’s metadata yourself.

How to add a book title to the BookTrack database

Go to School Admin, click on Book titles and click on Create New.

Move the cursor to the ISBN text input box and then scan the ISBN barcode on the back page of the book. Then click on Search.

BookTrack will lookup the metadata for the ISBN number in the database and automatically complete the rest of the data fields if the book’s data was found in the online ISBN database. In these cases you can simply click Save and continue to the next book. You may edit the metadata immediately, or later if you so wish.

But, if the book’s metadata could not be found in the online ISBN database, BookTrack will automatically unselect the Use ISBN tick box and allow you to enter the data yourself. (The yellow highlights the unselected tick box.)

Note that only the Title field is required, so you only have to add the Title of the book and can leave the rest blank. You can customize the title if you want to. Once done, click Save.

Adding and managing the school’s own publications that don’t have ISBN numbers

Some schools publish their own textbooks or workbooks and may want to manage them using BookTrack. These books will normally not have ISBN numbers. The following will describe how to add these book titles to the BookTrack system.

Go to School Admin, click on Book Titles and then click on Create New. Enter any 5 digit number under ISBN, making sure not to use the same number more than once. Unselect the Use ISBN tick box, as indicated in yellow above, and enter the title of the book. You do not have to enter any data other than the Title. Click Save.

Now you will be able to manage the books published by the school in the same way you manage the other textbooks that have ISBN numbers.