Book Cataloging
Over many years of avid reading my wife and I have collected quite a library. In addition, as the son of a career school librarian I have an instinctive love for accumulating books. When PC’s first became available it seemed natural to use them to keep your book collection records. But alas, as most database users find out, entering data is a nontrivial task – until now! This week I discovered some VERY inexpensive software that uses the power of the Internet. collectorz offers book cataloging software for $40 download. I highly recommend this software. It includes just about everything you could want to record about a book. I particularly like the ability to scrape information about a book from web sites like Amazon and Powells. For modern books with bar coded ISBN the cue cat support works great. If you don’t recognize cue cat it was a short lived attempt to create a cheap bar code reader for some reason that I no longer remember. What is important to me was that I had one buried in a drawer, thus I could catalog books with sweep of a wand at no additional cost! The software also allows you to export the database as HTML (can go on your web site), or CSV (import to other databases, spreadsheets or PDA). It also has a specific PDA support for ListPro. I expect to use the catalog as an on-going archive for books read (both that stay in the collection and those that don’t).
Bottomline – this weekend I cataloged almost 1300 books (with and without bar codes in little over a day’s work).
Posted: January 31st, 2005 under General.