Please stay tuned….
On the 16th I hinted lightly about a few plans I have, nothing to report on any of those. The project I had expected to start this week in which this blog was going to be part of has hit a slight snag.
I am in the process of getting my library up and running again. This is in part, do to my plans. Though I do not have all the recourses I would like in my library it does have a few which will allow me to do some research and reflections from here. Beyond that I have to go and visit the various libraries in the area which contain additional resources that I can use. There is no one library here that I have found that has all the resources I would like. (Though there is one college library in the area I haven’t checked out yet, but my hopes are not high.)
The process of setting up my personal library has caused some problems. First, I do not have enough shelving for my books. Second, I’m not sure where to put the shelving even if I had it. Third, in the move from Seattle to here my bookcases were damaged. Only one made the trip, but it was damaged and a few days ago when I went to bring it in from storage I realized it did not fair well. The hardware for the shelves is also missing, and it seems to have gotten a bit of water damage. Thus the first problem is increased since I now have basically no shelving. Instead my books remain boxed up unable for me to get to. (A few which were packed elsewhere are out, and I have several bags of books that were given to me a couple of months ago…)
Forth, in the preparation of setting up my library I decided that I will be cataloging all my items. I have yet to find any free tools to help me in this, though I have found a web site that will let me catalog up to 200 items for free. It saves a lot of typing when it is able to find the book via one of the library catalogs it searches. I have decided to use the Library of Congress Classification System to the extent I can. In order to do so I’m going to be looking up most of my books through the Library of Congress, Community of Christ Library, Graceland University Library, and several other academic libraries to ensure I get the correct numbers as I do not have access to whatever source libraries use to classify books via this system.
If anyone knows of a good program that may help me build my database please let me know. I think I will end up building a database in Access. This way it will have the entire data field I want. It may take a while though since it has been years since I have built a database, but I think it will take less time than some of my other alternatives….
In my dream system I could enter in the ISBN number, a title… and it would give me possible matches form various online resources and if my book was listed would quickly import the data.
Each item’s record would contain at least the following:
- LCC: ISBN:
- Title (Possibly broken into title/subtitle)
- Author(s)
- Editor(s)
- Translator(s)
- Publication Data (Location, publisher, copyright, # of pages, etc.)
- Edition
- date I acquired item (if known)
- Series/collection
- vol number…
- categories it fits (as defined by me)
- Copy number (if I have more than one copy in collection)
- CMS citation (or ability to create on demand based on record information) maybe some other options also…
The database should be easy to search by any and all of this information. It would also be nice to have a checkout system, for when I loan a book or even when I just take a book from my collection while working on a sermon, paper, or project, though this would not be a requirement.I think I will start working on building a database and see how it goes, for if I build my own custom system it can grow as my needs change, maybe I’ll even catalog my DVDs while I’m at it….It may seem a bit crazy, but hey I am limited right now in what I can do and so I might as well use this time for something that will be useful in the future that I may never have time to work on again.
Oh, a few nights ago I went on a short run. It was extremely short as I am way out of shape, but it was nice to be running again. I’m going work on getting myself back into shape. I need to go slow as I am not 100% recovered yet.
Peace…
Update: 21-1-06: I believe that I have the basic framework of a database setup. Now I just need to remember how to set up the forms, quires and reports so that the data will be imputed correctly into my relational database…. Also trying to decide if I am going to incorporate a user checkout system or not…
— Lyle II