Home Book Library Software

[rizzay]

Hey everyone,
My father has a pretty extensive book collection and I wanted to help him orgainize it. Is anyone familiar with a particular program to easily organize and categorize 3k+ books? We have them in a MS Access DB without ISBN numbers so if we could import that would be sweet. I was also thinking of getting him a scanner to eliminate most of the data entry. Any suggestions?

Thanks for your help!
-Mark

[eugene]

Do you want this on the web? Or is it merely a personal computer application?
What database fields do you have? The more information you have the better.
If this is not to be put on the web, what kind of computer system is he running?

[rizzay]

Hey Eugene,
Thanks for the response. It is primarily for use on his laptop which is running XP. Transforming into HTML pages would be nice but not required. Currently the information he tracks is Title, Author, Rating, Date read, and Binding (Hardback, paperback, etc). I found one at collectorz.com but their system does not allow for half ratings (8.5).

Thanks again,
Mark

[eugene]

As for ease of use and ease of extensibility, a MSAccess might work well for him.
There are other ways to go, but they may be a little bit more difficult to extend without more computer knowledge.

If you are a little more ambitious, Python, Perl, Ruby, Tcl/Tk or C# can be used create your own homemade program.

-Eugene

[QuickGold]

I know you can make a small program in Access that can do what you need, although I don't know what your background in Access is.

[Guest]

Thanks guys,
I created a MS database for him but it's not working as well as I would like. It's too easy to just delete records and isn't as robust as I would like. I'll keep looking around the web and see if i can find one.

Thanks,
Mark

[thevillageinn]

when you say you created an Access db for him, did you just set up a db, or did you write a little user interface which limits his options and makes things look nice?

if you did the former, and you are familiar with Access, it's not too hard to get started with VBA (Visual Basic for Applications - MS's easy version of Visual Basic). I did a bunch of stuff in VBA for my old job and would be happy to help you out, but I don't have the time to just throw something together for you from scratch.

it really sounds like Access is probably the easiest way to go for you and him, especially if he uses his laptop for the cataloging.

as far as the scanner, I'm assuming bar code scanner? do you have any of those goofy IBM / Radio Shack bar code scanners? They were free for a while, and though they were supposed to be proprietary, lots of simple apps were written to use the bar code scanning ability of them and dump the data into various forms for easy db entry. (I can't for the life of me remember what they were called, but some of them were shaped like cats.)

[muttdog]

Originally posted by thevillageinn@Feb 25 2004, 12:35 AM
have any of those goofy IBM
Hey man, what the deal against IBM??? just messin...

[thevillageinn]

so maybe it wasn't just IBM, but they were in on it for a while... ;)

I tried to get one for a while since I thought it would be handy, but here's a pic

http://www.danjcraig.com/screenshots/CueCat.jpg

[ozee]

I believe that was called a CueCat

[thevillageinn]

yes it was, I forgot to mention it. I googled for a minute and figured it out then got that image. some people did some interesting mods to spice them up a bit