{ enygmatic } | mobilis in mobili

I’ve been wanting to catalog my entire book collection for quite some time now. I wanted to use something more than a spreadsheet for keeping track of my books. Somewhere down the line I had the grandiose idea of actually writing my own little catalog software, but all that went out of the window once I saw Delicious Library, the library cataloging software of the mac. Unfortunately, no amount of searching found me a good enough clone for the windows desktop (yes I still run a windows desktop). Sometime back, once I got openSUSE up and running, I began hunting for similar applications for openSUSE. After much hunting, I narrowed down on Tellico.Tellico is a fabulous application, however for some reason I couldn’t manage to get it running behind a proxy server. ( I suspect that my limited intelligence and the fact that I am running a gnome desktop had something to do with it.) Anyway, while searching I came across this application called GCstar, and thats when the search ended .

In the words of the GCStar site:

GCstar is a free open source application for managing your collections. Detailed information on each item can be automatically retrieved from the internet and you can store additional data, such as the location or who you’ve lent it to. You may also search and filter your collection by many criteria.

It’s actually much more than that. It’s got a neat skinnable look. The application lets manage Movies,Video games, Books, Music, Numismatic, Wines, Board games and User defined collections. The book collection lets you search several online services like Amazon in order to fetch book data. You can either do this or enter the data by hand. It’s also got various export features. In fact apparently some user has also rigged up a script that lets you scan your books bar code using a web cam and fetch book information based on that (just like delicious). On the negative side the search and fetch seems a tad slow (maybe coz I’m behind a proxy and firewall) and some of the book covers fetched are inconsistent with their titles. Besides these minor teething problems, GCstar seems to be a great application to have. So if you like collecting stuff and want to be an organized pack rat, I suggest you give this application a try. (Did I mention that it works on windows too ? )

Technorati Tags: GCstar, book collection, catalog, , Linux, openSUSE 10.2