Book cataloging software - w/database

Cafe Society
1

I’ve been looking for some free/cheap book cataloging software that comes loaded with a database of books. Everything I’ve found (like Readerware seems to expect you to enter all your books manually and - tada! - now you have a catalog.

I’m thinking more along the lines of being able to search from within a program, have it come up with matches, put a checkmark next to the title that matches you have. Done.

The more I think of it, the more absurd the idea is that there could possibly be a database that exists like this for free or cheap, seeing how it would probably contain a gagillion books.

But, this is for a friend (a teacher) who was recently assigned to be the librarian in a very poor inner-city elementary school with a smattering of books and few computer resources if any. Looks like she’s going to have to be doing some cataloging by hand and I was trying to think of ways I can help make it easier on her.

If I could get my hands on a good database of books, even without a program to import it to, that’d be helpful. I could program something myself.

What says you?

2

Drat. I just deleted some of these programs.

I was looking for a book cataloguer because I have the memory of a gnat and was buying/checking out of the library multiple copies of books.

I found a couple of programs that you could type a title or author or isbn into and they would go find the books. I think AVCataloger was the slickest program. Not free, though. I think it was about $60.

3

Should have given a link for AVCataloger.

4

Most of these programs will hook into an already existing web database (e.g. Amazon, IMDB) to take care of things, so you simply need web access.

If using a Mac, Delicious Library is probably the best. It will scan the bar code using a camera to make things much faster. Price is $40.

5

Almost forgot - if you’re really willing to progam, you can use things like
Amazon’s Web Services to hook into their database. I imagine some of the
other web databases have something similar