Library
One of my long term goals is to set up a computer database of all the books I own. I want to be able to scan my books, be able to notate things like "so and so borrowed this book" or "using this book for x project and is currently located at y project area". I want to eventually have a nice set of bookshelves to keep all my books on.
When I saw an article on /. about someone who did organize his (and his wife's) book collection, I was curious and gave it a read. I had a few problems with the results. They decided that $30 particle board shelves were good to use, but were willing to spend a hundred dollars on a bar code scanner. Frankly I'm not a fan of particle board shelves. Some people, they don't have many books, or they stick with mostly paperback books, or they mix in knick knacks and collectibles between their books, and the shelves don't have to support much.
My book collections have been responsible for breaking particle board shelves since I was a child. I like my books hard bound, I fit as many books as I possibly can on my shelf, and when the shelf is full and I don't have another? I start sticking additional books on top of the ones already there. I need solid shelves, there's just no other way around it. Factor in the whole living in earth quake country, where a five point oh on the richter scale is not even worth snoring at, but will occasionally upset the pets and the bookshelves, and I need something that's not going to eventually sag and break under prolonged heavy weight and will be structurally sound, steady and well balanced.
I've got my eyes on a solid wood modular system from Ikea that's got cross braces. They recommend every third section, but I'll just go every other section due to the before mentioned earth quake country. If I could find something metal and of a high enough gauge that it wouldn't fall down if I breathed on it (like the otherwise good looking metal cubes I'd been eying at the container store a year ago, until I got a chance to inspect them in person), I would be interested as long as it looked okay enough. However, I suspect the Ikea solid wood solution is going to be the most cost effective for me. I just need to figure out what color to paint or stain the things when I finally get them.
I do need to also figure out how to make my :CueCat talk to my computer in such a way that I could make a program understand it if I made it scan ISBN barcodes for my book database. Oh, that's another thing that bothered me about the article, the author and his wife blew off the use of the ISBN barcodes because it would leave their database all out of a "logical" order. Frell that, you don't have to organize the books on the shelf by the ISBN number, however they also wanted to sort things by subject matter and therefore selected the library of congress numbering system for sorting books, which made it impossible for them to add their foreign books and children's books to the database. Short sighted if you ask me.
I suppose the thing to remember is that it's their library, not mine, so it doesn't matter if I think some of their choices were just absolutely stupid, and others were less intelligent than they thought. I just know that I'm happy to have everything sorted by author alphabetically, and if I end up with my genres muddled together, no big. Frankly, if the database is any good, I can sort by any number of things, including author, subject matter, age of the book, and everything in between, on the computer, and if I'm truly just browsing for something to read, the subject matter shouldn't matter.