Steve Boxwell is a student at Bible college who, among other things, loves books. This week, we’ve asked Steve to share how he stays on top of his large (and growing) book collection. If you have other suggestions for how to stay on top of your book collection, we’d love you to share them.
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It’s one of the cruel architectural realities of Moore College that the fastest way for me to get home from class of an afternoon is through the College bookstore, Moore Books. This coupled with a book reading (and hoarding) habit spanning over a decade has meant that my book collection has become, well…biggish.
With a large personal library containing many gems of wisdom, I wanted to make it a resource that friends from church, College and the like could really benefit from, without the stress for me of having to remember where the books have all gone, and then chase them up.
Enter Delicious Library 2, which is a nifty little programme for Mac that I stumbled across late last year. It enables me to keep a digital record of all the books I own, where they are now and who has borrowed them in the past. Using the built in camera on my Macbook, I scan the barcode and it searches Amazon for the book’s details.
The book then appears on my digital shelf with all sorts of details, including current market value and even its Dewey decimal number for the anally retentive amongst us. CD, DVDs, board games and even power tools can also be kept in the Delicious library.
Delicious has heaps of features that I don’t use yet, but let me tell you how I am using it and three areas where I think it could be a helpful ministry tool.
- The first and most obvious way is that it takes the hard work out of loaning books. People rarely mean to steal Christian literature but sadly our memories often fail us and books may never return to their owner, thus preventing you from lending them out to others. Delicious synchronises with iCal (a calendar programme for Mac), so after a period of time which you can set, a polite automated email is sent out asking the borrower to please return the resource.
- Secondly, it keeps a record of all your books, which may come in handy for insurance purposes. Should something happen to our books, I would hopefully not have to quibble with my insurer over whether or not I am entitled to buy the New Bible Dictionary again.
- Thirdly, it empowers others to ask to borrow your books. The web publishing option means your friends or congregation can search part or all of your collection to see if you’ve got something on a topic that they might want to know more about. In an age where knowledge is a commodity, it’s nice that there are resources encouraging us to share what we have with one another.
Delicious does have limitations. As I mentioned, it searches Amazon for details about your books and as there is no Australian chapter (pardon the pun) of Amazon as yet, it means that books published in Australia may not be recognised. This just means you will have to enter them manually, which is quite straightforward. I have been pleasantly surprised by what it has recognised – of my 500ish books, only 20 of them weren’t found and most of those were obscure books put out by tiny publishers. Older books that pre-date the barcode (or even the ISBN) aren’t a problem as there are a range of other search options that mean your digital library accurately reflects your physical one.
Delicious is a free download for trial, and licensing costs $40US. To find out about the full range of features and to download it for yourself visit www.delicious-monster.com.
At home we use a program for the PC called Libra (http://www.getlibra.com/), which does the who ISBN thing with Amazon and it allows you to tag them like “books to read”, “lent out” etc.. I haven’t tried its web cam as a bar code scanner function, but that does look cool, and to top it all off… its free!
Thanks for the suggestion Andrew – great option for all the non-Mac users!
Is there any connection with the Delicious social bookmark? there’s a sorta similar plugin with linkedIn, where it searches the amazon library for books u’ve read and you can rate/recommend them.
Interesting question Inspiredworlds. I’m not sure – but I’ve passed on to Delicious Library for their response. Stay tuned!
We (Delicious Monster Software) are in no way affiliated with Del.icio.us, the bookmarking company. We’re a tiny (3 person) Indie Mac Software company founded and developed by Wil Shipley. Del.icio.us is a software company that’s writes a bookmarking program that then allows you to share your favorite websites with your friends.
Thanks, guys.
I can heartily recommend Librarything, which does what Delicious Library does, with the added advantage that your library is visible to others, so they can browse and request to borrow books etc.
If we got our act together at college, we could have students using it so we know who to ask when we’re trying to track something down.
As an example, here’s my Librarything library.