The Great Cataloguing Project

books May 5, 2020

And here they are. The five components of my next major project.

Music Books and Sheets (2 shelves worth)
VHS tapes (lots of family home videos etc: this one is from a UK trip in Feb 1989. Priceless!)
Hi8 camcorder ‘cassette’ video tapes. Lots of trips and family videos (again: priceless! This one was from 1998)
Slides (transparencies) – going back to the 80s. A fair few of these Little Yellow Boxes. Most don’t have this vaguely helpful writing on them: what is in this and when was it taken?

And…the big one:

Photos. Probably hundreds of packets like this. I think this writing was done recently. Most don’t have this.

So, you’ve probably guessed (by reading the title) that this is a project to slowly catalogue all of these things.

But first…The Books? The Blu-rays?

Actually the (non sheet-music) books and all the Blu-rays/DVDs etc have been done. As part of downsizing from a big house to smaller apartment, perhaps 75% were donated to charities.

It was fairly easy to catalogue the remaining items here at the new place. I can recommend the free LibraryThing cloud-based system for this.

After you’ve set up an account, you can install a phone/tablet app. And/or use a browser.

Then just enter your books and it tries to retrieve the full data record for it (Title, Author, Reviews etc etc). In order of ease-of-use, I did this:

Scan the book’s barcode with the phone’s camera (magic!)
If barcode not available or found: manually type in the ISBN
If ISBN fails, search by Title/Author etc
If all that fails, then manually enter a new entry. You can even photograph the cover and upload it.

Metadata (tags) are automatically added for the ‘found’ ones. Or you can add your own. You can add and search etc from the browser or your mobile device.

It also supports other things Blu-rays, X-Box Games and you can add your own media or item types.

The Project Itself: Step One

The first challenge is to work out what sort of cataloguing system can I use for the Photos, Video Recordings etc.

Something similar to LibraryThing (LT)?

LibraryThing itself? It may not be suitable or flexible enough. It is very ‘book’ based; officially everything is a ‘book’. Plus it’s a closed, proprietary system AFAIK (of course you can easily export your data and in multiple formats) . If they vanish or start charging (or charging more, see below), then grrr.

A great note-taking system called Evernote did just this; free, hooked you, then brought in fees to do what used to be free!

Another, lesser, consideration is that the free version of LT has item limits, which I’ll think I’ll hit.

So I’m looking for a more open Catalogue system, where I can:

Store the database on, say, my own Dropbox folder
Use it from a phone app, tablet app and browser

Besides the Sheet Music there’s no need to use an Internet ‘look up’ items as I catalogue them. I’ll be manually entering what each item is.

Which means I have to think about what I record for each thing. Early thoughts are:

ID (unique; ‘slides001’, book’s-title, tape’s-name)
Media Type
Label (what else is written on it)
Date (not as simple as you think, some photo-packs are just a Year, or – worse – Year??)
Contents (say, a list of songs for the Song Books, trips/events on a given video tape)
Keywords (family, work, person’s name)
Comments
Important/Interesting (boolean; Y or N)
Storage location (photobox 1980s-02)

I’d like to be able to have all of these as database indexes, or at least be able to search/sort on them.

It would have to be able to import existing, simple Excel catalogues (or via CSV) and even – ideally – LibraryThing exports, enabling me to have everything in one place.