Library Systems - Post #9

Oh technology, when will you do what I want you to?

I'm a pretty organized person. I like to keep track of my work and school schedules with a daily planner (though I've been fooling around with Google Calendar lately, so that may change). I've really enjoyed working on redesigning some of University Library's subject resource pages, because I get to divide up and organize content and make it easier to use. I've really enjoyed that aspect of our project; taking an out of date book and making it more organized, easier to use, and more valuable, frankly.

I’ve had a personal crisis lately with organization. I have quite a few CDs and books, and a few DVDs. What I’ve really been wanting is a way to catalog all of them, so I know what I have, what I’ve loaned out, what I need to read/listen to/watch, and what I can get rid of.

I’ve found decent solutions for 2 out of 3, so far. For books, LibraryThing is great. You can easily look your books up by ISBN, title, author, etc. You can add tags to your books and create a tag cloud. You can also compare your collections with other people, and get some great recommendations. You can only input 200 for free; it costs $10/year or $25 for life to catalog as many as you want.

For DVDs, I’ve been using DVD Aficionado. It’s free, but it’s a bit clunky. It’s essentially a glorified spreadsheet, but all you really have to do is enter the UPC code, so it saves a lot of work. I’ve heard good things about DVD Profiler, which costs $29.95.

I still haven’t found a good free solution for cataloging CDs. At this point I have a text file with artists and albums, but that’s very hard to search, pretty much impossible to format, etc. I started to make a spreadsheet, but that just seems to be a waste of time. What if I want to add more information about each album? I found a freeware application called Libra that will catalog CDs, as well as DVDs, books, etc. It even lets you use your webcam as a barcode scanner! Of course it had to be too good to be true. The developers have apparently vanished and it’s no longer supported. Oh well. I’ll keep looking.