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Libby To Notion

project workflow toolkit notion-api notion libby reading library open-source python

Are you an avid reader? Tend your digital library garden with LibbyToNotion, a Python-based, fully open-source package, that allows you to automatically populate your Notion “Books” database with the ebooks and audiobooks borrowed from your public libraries via Libby by OverDrive.


Table of contents
  1. Description
  2. GitHub Repository
  3. Usage
    1. Libby Timeline Export
    2. Interfacing with Notion
    3. Running the script
  4. Requirements
  5. Directory Structure
  6. Sources

LibbyToNotion in actionLibbyToNotion in action

Description

This project allows you to populate your Notion “Books” database with ebooks / audiobooks borrowed via Libby using the Notion API and the Libby Timeline Export. If you’d like this to happen periodically (i.e. automatically), run the script scripts/runLibbyToNotion.sh at a reasonable frequency using a crontab job.

GitHub Repository

You can find the all the assosciated code for LibbyToNotion in this github repository

Usage

Libby Timeline Export

  • Login to your Libby account in their web app https://libbyapp.com/.
  • Go to the Timeline (modify it as needed) and click Export Timeline and choose Data (json). This will take you to an url. Copy the url and add it to secrets/secrets_libby.json in the following format:
{
    "url": "add the timeline json url here"
}
  • Note: Remember to click Export Timeline -> Data (json) often as you borrow books via Libby. This is to synchronize your account with the URL.

Interfacing with Notion

  • Register a private integration on your Notion workspace (follow instructions online)
  • Obtain its notionToken
  • Create a database / choose existing database on Notion to contain all the entries from Libby. Make sure it has the following properties. If you want to add more properties or remove, modify the function getAllLibbyItems and getNotionPageEntryFromProp in lib/port_utils.py.
Title property: Name
Text properties: Author, ISBN
Select properties: Status, Format
Date properties: LibbyDate
  • Get its databaseID and add it to secrets/secrets_notion.json in the following format:
{
    "notionToken": "your notion token",
    "databaseID": "your notion database ID"
}

Running the script

  • Create a python conda env using requirements.txt
  • Run the python script src/libbyToNotion.py with --fullLibby argument as True. Note that this will automatically set the Status of all items from Libby to be libby-inbox.
  • Currently, the logic takes in all unique borrowed items from the Libby Timeline, gets all the rows from the Notion database, and verifies that items aren’t repeated. This can be made more efficient if needed by filtering out only recently added items from the Timeline (set --fullLibby to False and populating the else block which currently shows NotImplementedError). But for now, it is simpler to just modify it locally after getting all items from the Timeline on Libby. To do a one time cover update, set argument --oneTimeCoverUpdate to True and --fullLibby to False.
  • You can periodically run this file again as a script scripts/runLibbyToNotion.sh using a crontab job to get periodic updates. For more information on Crontab, check out this reference.

Requirements

You can install all the requirements using the following command:

pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -e .

Directory Structure

.
+-- docs/
|   +-- images/
|   |   +-- demo.png
|   |   +-- icon.png
+-- globalStore/
|   +-- constants.py
+-- lib/
|   +-- port_utils.py
|   +-- utils.py
+-- notebooks/
|   +-- Trial.py
+-- scripts/
|   +-- runLibbyToNotion.sh
+-- secrets/
|   +-- secrets_notion.json
|   +-- secrets_libby.json
+-- src/
|   +-- libbyToNotion.py
+-- tests/
|   +-- testNotionAPI.py
|   +-- testLibbyDataRetrieval.py
+-- .gitignore
+-- juyptext.toml
+-- LICENSE
+-- README.md
+-- requirements.txt
+-- STDOUTlog_examples.txt

Sources


If you use this in your work and want to adapt this code, please consider starring the github repo or forking from it!

You can cite it as:

@misc{ nanbhas2023libbyToNotion,
  title         = "Libby To Notion",
  author        = "Bhaskhar, Nandita",
  howpublished  = "GitHub Repo, https://github.com/nanbhas/LibbyToNotion",
  year          = "2023",
  url           = "https://web.stanford.edu/~nanbhas/projects/libby-to-notion/"
}