Any serious book collectors? Looking for quality catalog software

[olnacl]

Visiting a friend with a large book collection - 10,000 +. She wants to catalog them in a searchable database. Looking at Book Collector at the moment, but it seems to be somewhat counterintuitive.
Suggestions welcomed.

[Racer X]

readerware?

[Doc]

Delicious Library and a hand-scanner.
http://delicious-monster.com/

Use an iSight or a barcode scanner and the thing will automate entries from the ISBN barcodes.

[decay]

she could also use this site - i used an old CueCat scanner & ISBN barcodes to enter mine.

http://www.librarything.com/

it would then be available from any computer that can access the internet.

[clay]

custom filemaker database? or bento?

[olnacl]

Thanks. I checked those out and they are not full featured enough for her needs. If you are familiar with Book Collector, it creates a database with customizable fields, which are essential for her catalog needs. I appreciate the suggestions though.

[cbelt3]

Strangely my kids downloaded a shareware that uses the iSight camera as a bar code 'scanner' to catalog their library. Worked very nicely for modern tomes.

10,000 books. Wow. So much to read, so little time. That would take me.. well over 27 years at a book a day.

For some reason I'm thinking of the "All the Time In the World" episode of the Twilight Zone, starring Burgess Meredith. True bibliophiles understood the incredible loss when he broke his glasses at the end.

[olnacl]

Yes, she is a serious collector with many art books. I'm trying out "Books for MacOS X" right now, but it seems slow to pick up the info from the library of congress and with as many books to catalog, that's a deal killer right there. If Book Collector was more intuitive, it would win hands down, but it's a pain to learn as not all the same movements do the same things in all fields - some are single clicks, others double clicks while still others might respond to right clicks and yet another may take a trip to the menu bar. I'm sure, by the time she gets done with the work, she'll know the program backwards and forwards, but, as a software tester, I can see a lot of bug reports and human interface suggestions. Here's what's ahead times multiple rooms and walls:

Taken with the built-in isight on her MBP.

BTW, she doesn't want the inventory stored online as some of the catalog software does - want's it on her own computer in case the software company stops supporting it. OK to use online searches to get the info, but wants the actual database on her computer, so that leaves out several possibilities.

[decay]

here's my friend Barney's LibraryThing page.

http://www.librarything.com/profile/Dannelke

5,033 books cataloged - i bet he has more than that, though

[BobC]

I've used Books a bit (although not in a while), and found a way to speed things up (subjectively) somewhat for large batches.

If you scan or type(*) your ISBNs into a text document, you can zip through as many as you want to put in a batch. Then you can tell Books to import the list of numbers and do its lookups for the batch while you do something else. It won't take less time overall, but there's less time that you're tied up waiting for it, so it'll seem quicker.

(* Judging from your friend's shelves, she may have a lot of esoteric or older books that aren't barcoded, so there may be more manual input needed on the front side.)