How to catalogue your books easily

[mundens]

I have thousands of books. Once, we considered creating a library of role-playing books and games and making it available on line so that some of those books I own actually get used by people. But the stumbling block was cataloguing it all and creating the necessary database to make it searchable and keep track of everything.

grandexperiment, I think, suggested press-ganging my sons, but even so it would be a huge task! But other people have this problem, and here's a pre-packaged solution that I may take advantage of soon!

Comments

[mashugenah.livejournal.com]

I use a program called, imaginatively, BookDB. http://www.spacejock.com/BookDB.html

It has all the usual entry fields for book information, as well as borrower support. So you can track multiple copies of the same book with different borrowers. All in all, it's pretty handy. The only additional feature I'd like is to allow a book to have more than two authors. It uses something akin to LJ tags for individual books, so books can be in as many different categories as you like.

[ferrouswheel.livejournal.com]

When I was 12 or so I started trying to enter all your comics into an excel worksheet. I started with the Xmen (of course), but only got through about 100 before I got distracted by other things!

[ferrouswheel.livejournal.com]

LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com/) is also good at cataloging books, but might not be sufficient for providing a library service and I don't know if you can export the data...

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

But the stumbling block was cataloguing it all and creating the necessary database to make it searchable and keep track of everything.

Apparently the best "primary key", if you like, when creating an RPG list is by publisher!