For each book, I wanted to record the title, author, two or three summary sentences and reminder of what it can be used for, and up to about 6 tags (probably themes, key phonics, genre, ...), in the hope that I could search by title, author, or tags... and find the book!
An easy way to do it would be to create a blog, and have each book as an entry, and use the tags to do all the organising. Unfortunately then I'd need internet connection to access the list, and when I'm relief teaching, that might be a pain. Also, I was sort of self-conscious about creating web junk. It's not going to be a resource worth sharing, there are fantastic wiki-style websites where people properly review and catergorise literature. My database would be merely an electronic (therefore searchable, expandable, transportable) version of a box of file cards, organised and expressed with a logic all of my own. No need to display that.
So anyway,
I'm trialling my friend's suggestion, Delicious Library 2.o. It's only available for Macs and if I like it, I will need to part with US$40.
Advantages: 1) Its stand out cool feature is that for most books, I don't need to type in any of the standard details. I just hold the barcode of the book in front of my inbuilt camera and it reads the barcode! Then the program contacts amazon.com to get the cover pic, all publishing details, summary, reviews, and even a list of other titles by the same author. Beautiful! 2) There's space for me to add my own notes (though annoyingly it wont let me do paragraph breaks). 3) The display is very attractive:
Annoying features: 1) There is no tagging function. I am able to catergorise books by creating "shelves" but that requires me to drag and drop books one by one. 2) There is no text based search function? I think? There is supposed to be a speech recognition search function but it doesn't seem to like me or work or something... or maybe I'm not doing it right, not sure. 3) Within shelves I can't reorder the books and it orders them alphabetically according to the author's first name. 4) 4 of the 5 Australian books that I have tried to input have not been identified by the amazon database. They're common books, one is by a major Australian writer, and yet they didn't register. They are the grey blocks where covers should be in the pic above.
So I'm feeling a bit ambivalent about it. Love the visuals and surely that will be an important compensation for the lack of searchability. Love how quickly and easily the scanning happens - it's better than I ever imagined. I think it will do the job of helping me recall books I've read. But then I just feel perplexed by the lack of tagging and search function...
Will trial it for a little longer and keep looking at alternatives.
