A question for Gentle Readers, and I know I’ve asked this before... do any of y’all use book catalog software? Your Humble Blogger is about to move residences again, and thus are changing insurance coverage again, and this time I realio trulio want to have a list of all our books. Hahahahaha! What fun!
Now, I know about the LibraryThing, which seems cheap enough, although part of the point of it is to share library information, which doesn’t particularly appeal to me. I could, of course, set up a database here on my pc, but I don’t want to type everything in by hand. I know there are lots of systems that will look up information in various on-line sources, but I don’t know how many of them are good, reliable and easy to use. And cheap. Or how well they balance all those things.
I have about, let me see (counts under his breath ... five, six ...) umpty-’leven gazillion books, so I do not want to start on anything that will hit a limit, either with an actual limit or by getting slow and unmanageable when it gets big. I don’t particularly need the system that is the best at finding information on old or uncommon books, although I would like to be able to over-write or enter information myself, particularly for the handful of handmade or special-edition books in the collection. There are some benefits to having the thing on-line, particularly to be able to enter stuff from my Best Reader’s office, but there are also benefits to being about to download the database and put it on a CDR. Oh, and it has to work on a Windows PC, so Mac-only native software is no good (although of course web-based stuff is fine).
If any Gentle Reader has been using any book database, please let me know which one and how you like it. Also, if any of y’all have experience dealing with, say, the negative aspects of not ever cataloguing your books, let me know; I wouldn’t mind being given a good reason not to bother with the whole thing.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Seems like the ideal system would involve a bar-code scanner, a piece of software on the client PC to parse the scan, and an online database that would first match the bar code with known products, and then add that product to your own personal collection. Being able to export tables from a database to, say, Excel or Access for easy report-building, etc. would probably be desirable, too.
This would break down, of course, with books that don’t have bar codes, and such, but those are probably not “books” for insurance purposes, so much as “heirlooms” or “antiques” or even “artworks.” But even so, the ability to enter such things by hand would solve that problem…
Unfortunately, while I’m capable of imagining, designing, and even building such a tool, I don’t know of any that do that already out there.
peace
Matt
Looked at LibraryThing, and it looks like you can make a collection “private,” thus preventing other users from seeing your collection. Your statistics (user name, number of books, like that) seem to be publicly available, though, FWIW.
peace
Matt
Sadly, my solution (Delicious Library) is Mac-only. I don’t know what to recommend for Windows.
We just take photos of our bookshelves for insurance purposes. It was easier to take photos of one shelf at a time, lit and clear so you could see the titles, than it was to try to catalog them. And the insurance company was fine with a stack of photos.
But I’m told there ARE bar-coding pens for home libraries. I just never saw the point in having a complete list in text somewhere.
Insurance reasons aside, I like having a complete list in text so that I can keep it in my PDA and not buy duplicate books when I’m in the secondhand store.