Alexandria is a GNOME application for managing collections of books.

Alexandria is written in Ruby, and is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. See the file COPYING for more information.

Alexandria is an application for managing a personal book library. Its main recommending feature is its clean, intuitive interface. Alexandria is able to retrieve book information and cover images from a wide variety of online data sources. It also features extensive import and export options, a loan interface, and smart libraries. Alexandria is written in Ruby using ruby-gnome2.

You can install alexandria as a gem by running

gem install alexandria-book-collection-manager

Alternatively, download the source from the github repository at http://www.github.com/mvz/alexandria-book-collection-manager and follow the installation instructions.

For source code and bug reporting, see the repository on github at http://www.github.com/mvz/alexandria-book-collection-manager.

Alexandria is a simple program designed to allow individuals to keep a catalogue of their book collection. In addition, it enables users to keep track of books which are on loan.

• retrieves and displays book information (sometimes with cover pictures) from several online libraries and bookshops, such as
  • WorldCat
  • US Library of Congress
  • British Library
• allows books to be added and updated by hand
• enables searches either by ISBN, title, author or keyword
• supports the Z39.50 standard and allow you to manage your own sources (e.g. university libraries)
• saves data using the plain-text YAML format
• can import and export data into ONIX, Tellico, ISBN-list and GoodReads CSV formats
• can export XHTML web pages of your libraries, themable with CSS
• allows marking your books as loaned, each with the loan-date and the name of the person who has borrowed them
• features a HIG-compliant user interface
• shows books in different views (standard list or icons list), that can be filtered and/or sorted
• handles book rating and notes
• supports CueCat and standard "keyboard wedge" barcode readers
• includes translations for several languages
• is documented in a complete manual (at the moment only in English and Japanese)

Alexandria is not without problems. See doc/BUGS for a summary of issues.

There are full instructions for installing Alexandria from source in the file INSTALL, including information about all the dependencies.

If you are installing on a Debian-based system, things should be easier as the dependencies can be handled automatically.

To run the program, just type alexandria or, to get verbose debugging information, alexandria --debug

If you are running GNOME, Alexandria should appear under the 'Applications > Office' menu.

The following people have contributed to Alexandria over the years:

• Alexander McCormmach alexander@tunicate.org
• Aymeric Nys aymeric@nnx.com
• Cathal Mc Ginley cathal.alexandria@gnostai.org
• Claudio Belotti bel8@lilik.it
• Constantine Evans cevans@costinet.org
• Dafydd Harries daf@muse.19inch.net
• Javier Fernandez-Sanguino Pena jfs@debian.org
• Joseph Haig josephhaig@gmail.com
• Joseph Method tristil@gmail.com
• Kevin Schultz schultkl@ieee.org
• Laurent Sansonetti lrz@gnome.org
• Marco Costantini costanti@science.unitn.it
• Mathieu Leduc-Hamel arrak@arrak.org
• Matijs van Zuijlen matijs@matijs.net
• Owain Evans o.evans@gmail.com
• Pascal Terjan pterjan@linuxfr.org
• Rene Samselnig sandman@sdm-net.org
• Robby Stephenson robby@periapsis.org
• Sun Ning classicning@gmail.com
• Takayuki Kusano AE5T-KSN@asahi-net.or.jp
• Timothy Malone timothy.malone@gmail.com
• Zachary P. Landau kapheine@hypa.net

• Cathal Mc Ginley cathal.alexandria@gnostai.org
• Liam Davison registrations@liamjdavison.info

• Andreas Nilsson nisses.mail@home.se
• Stefanie Dijoux stefanie.dijoux@gmail.com

• Adrián Chaves Fernández adriyetichaves@gmail.com (gl)
• Cathal Mc Ginley cathal.alexandria@gnostai.org (ga)
• CHIKAMA Masaki masaki.chikama@gmail.com (ja)
• Dafydd Harries daf@muse.19inch.net (cy)
• Damjan Dimitrioski damjandimitrioski@gmail.com (mk)
• Giacomo Margarito giacomomargarito@gmail.com (it)
• Jack Myrseh jack@enkom.no (nb)
• Joachim Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de (de)
• José Ling jlgdot369@gmail.com (zh_TW)
• Lennart Karssen lennart@karssen.org (nl)
• Lígia Moreira ligia.moreira@netvisao.pt (fr, pt, pt_BR)
• Martin Karlsson martinkarlsson81@hotmail.com (sv)
• Michael Kotsarinis mkotsari1@pre.forthnet.gr (el)
• Miguel Ángel García magmax@ieee.org (es)
• Peter Kováč kovac.peter@fotopriestor.sk (sk)
• Petr Vanek vanous@penguin.cz (cs)
• Piotr Drąg piotrdrag@gmail.com (pl)
• Serhij Dubyk dubyk@library.lviv.ua (uk)

• David Weinehall tao@debian.org (sv)
• Jiří Pejchal jiri.pejchal@gmail.com (cs)
• Laurent Sansonetti lrz@gnome.org (fr)
• Lucas Rocha lucasr@im.ufba.br (pt_BR)
• Marco Costantini costanti@science.unitn.it (it)
• Masao Mutoh mutoh@highway.ne.jp (ja)
• Mirko Maischberger mirko@lilik.it (it)

Unless otherwise noted, the following license applies to all files that are part of Alexandria:

Copyright (C) 2004 Laurent Sansonetti Copyright (C) 2005-2010,2014-2020 Alexandria Contributors

Alexandria is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See the file COPYING for details.