[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by cozworth

If you have thousands of titles now and don't want to do any manual input than I hope you already have some of the info stored into some sort of organized fashion.

I accept that some manual input will be required, but I don't want it to be all manual input. Frankly, the benefits of having the database would not be equal to the work needed to create it.

And I'm reasonably organized. Paper books are shelved by type, and by author within type for fiction, and other ways for non-fiction. There is some adjustment caused by format: the same shelves don't hold paperbacks, hardbacks, and "coffee table" volumes. Shelving is by size, first.

eBooks are organized in a similar fashion, with a hierarchal directory structure for categories. I'm doing some cleanup and rearrangement to make it a bit easier to locate specific stuff.

An Excel spreadsheet will take care of most of what you would need. However, the choice of your database will determine if you have to do any additional work. Every database I have worked with has a feature to inport a spreadsheet.

I have Excel here, as well as Access, Postgresql, Interbase, and several other things. Creating a database to rice, slice, and dice the data as desired would be the least of the problems.

However, if you don't have even that much - well....you waited too long to start now!

I have the software and the requisite knowledge. What I lack is time and energy.

Well, no, not really.

I have tried using search programs to fill certain info but they leave a lot to be desired. For example...if you want to know what publishing house put out a certain book, that info will always be available online. I tend to leave fields like that blank in historical data. I just load the info when it is easy for me at a later date - or not at all. But - when I loaded a book into my hardrive and what changes were made to the format etc...that is info that I would have to enter myself. for the purpose of knowing what I have and what I can do with it , it is far more important to me. I just make sure I enter complete data on new entries as I get them.

Oh, certainly. There will be data that will be blank, either because I haven't needed to track it down, or because it may not exist.

The other issue is that search/pick data is not always correct. While I would likely be inclined to use such a function if I were in your position, I would be cautious about accepting the data provided as gospel.

I don't accept any data as gospel. But I'm willing to accept some inaccuracies, to be handled on an exception basis. Essentially, if I find out it's wrong, I'll correct it. If I never learn it's wrong, I won't care, because it means no occasion arose to demonstrate it was wrong.

If you have 5000 titles...one way or the other...you have a job ahead of you.

Just keep in mind that as negative as this post may sound I am really just envious or your library!

I began collecting books back before personal databases on PCs were even a gleam in anyone's eye, and I have a fair bit of stuff that predates barcodes.

eBooks are a more recent phenomena.

I just did a head count: I have an ebooks directory, containing fiction, non-fiction, and reference titles, and a Docs directory containing a variety of computer technical documentation.

The ebooks directory is 5.49 GB in size, with 25,021 files in 1,776 directories, and the Docs directory is 4.12 GB in size, with 102,234 files in 2,298 folders.

Number of files does not equal number of ebooks: my preferred ebook format is HTML, and many volumes consist of a number of HTML files and associated image files.

But it's still a fair number of books, stories, and articles.
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Dennis