Personal library software

Finding the perfect software to organise our libraries has been a bit of a hassle. I was first looking for something Windows-y and free and flexible enough to handle books, cds, dvds, comics, and anything else we got the urge to categorise and label. These days, I'm running Kubuntu 8.somethingorother, and finding a collection manager was a lot easier. I'm using Tellico at the moment, which seems pretty sturdy for our purposes.

A couple of the major requirements I've been considering so far:

Easy to input data

Putting in the odd one or two books when you acquire them is one thing, starting up a system with four shelves of books is another. You've got to be a certain sort of person to want to fiddle around with this much personal data entry anyway, but no one wants to have to add all of the fields manually. The Library Grail will have to have some major automation going for it, and be able to download data from multiple sources. Just cribbing stuff off Amazon US is not working so well for us.

Flexible

When we started, we envisaged it as a way of organising cds. So we either had the problem that book cataloguers couldn't handle storing artists, or that media cataloguers couldn't handle call numbers. Custom fields are only useful if you can search and sort using them, and you don't have to flick to another tab to input the data.

Movable

No one wants a black hole of a database. If we're inputing heaps of data, we want to be able to get it out of whatever program we're using and shove it into another one.

Free (and open source)

Free is good. Guilt free is better. Let's all try to use non-propriety open source software whenever possible.


I figure for most people's purposes, the excellent web-based services like LibraryThing and Gurulib would be more than sufficient. Or if you prefer to use offline resources, OS-specific programs like Delicious for Macs and a whole bunch of Windows options might be useful. But I haven't found anything really customisable and user-friendly other than this Tellico thing.