Do Pastors Dream of Electric Sheep?

Books for the spring quarter.

Pastors have lots of books. Despite the advent of more and more digital works, theology by in large remains in the print domain and our libraries continue to grow. The question before us is how do we manage our ever-growing libraries?

While some have their own organizational methods and can exist without using technology, many of us have to use digital tools to manage our libraries. These library managers will used to track your number of books, where they are located, who you have loaned them to, and how much you have spent on your books (don’t show your wife). Some of the software can also track your DVD and CD collections and some even can track your tool collection. Tracking your “stuff” can be helpful if you ever need to file an insurance claim. No more guessing, simply hand the adjuster your list of goods lost (stored off site of course as a backup).

Library Managers are easily found through a google search. Here is what you need to look for:

• Auto Searching. Most library management programs reach out to services such as Amazon.com to gather information based on your search parameters. More advanced programs also reach out to services like the Library of Congress to gather even more information. The most common search variables are titles and ISBN numbers.
• Auto fill. You want the software to accurately fill in data from the above web services.
• Available Fields. Some software offers more fields than others. A helpful program gives you plenty of options for importing information.
• Export Functionality. While you may love your software now, you may hate it in a year. However, if the software you used doesn’t allow for easy exporting you may be stuck with the software unless you want to manually reenter all of your books again.
• Print Services. It is best if you can both print out a list of your books and also print labels if you are so inclined.

Like I said, a quick google search can turn up many options for management. I’d like to highlight a few of these programs.

If you are interested cloud computing LibraryThing might be of interest to you. It allows you to catalog your books and make your library searchable and by others. It is free to catalog up to 200 books. Beyond that you can pay $10 a year or $25 for a lifetime membership. This is a growing service with one major downside. If you don’t have internet, you don’t have the service available. One cool feature is that you can buy a CueCat Scanner to quickly scan your books. You can also share your library and view the library of others.

Desktop Options (Mac focused):

Delicious Library is the most popular piece of software out there in this category. It has a slick interface and is very user-friendly. It uses the iSight camera available on most Macs to scan barcodes and import the information from Amazon.com. This program has a number of options including books, music, tools, and even clothes. I used this for my first three years of mac ownership, but switched after I had some library corruption issues that weren’t able to be fixed. Delicious Library currently retails for $40.

Another option is Bookpedia by Bruji. Bookpedia has a nice clean interface at the inexpensive price of $18. Bruji offers three companion applications to Bookpedia: CDpedia, DVDpedia, and Gamepedia. You are able to bundle applications together to lower cost which also allows you to get what you need (for example, I don’t catalog my CDs). Bruji’s website includes a number of user-created plugins that give access to more functionality beyond what most users will want/need.

My current choice of library management software is Booxter from Deep Prose Software. It doesn’t have the most eye popping interface but it is a powerhouse for managing my books. I now have over 1,000 books in the program and it doesn’t slow down at all. What I love about Booxter is the ability to do what I want with the software. It easily searches both the Library of Congress and Amazon.com to get information. I can quickly add in information about purchase price and retail price. One huge feature of this program is that it allows me to specify if a person is an author, editor, illustrator, or translator. Somehow, this feature is lacking in many other pieces of cataloging software. After I get all this information imported I can print labels or print lists. Unlike Delicious Library, Booxter does not catalog multiple media types in the same window. Instead you have multiple libraries. I have two now: one for books and the other for DVDs. Booxter retails for $49.99.

There is one last piece of software I think deserves mention: Librarian Pro from Koingo Software. I want to mention this because it seems to be a stable and feature rich program and also is cross-platform (both Windows and Mac). It comes at a great price: $19.95 for a single-user license and $7.95 for a single-user educational license.

Smart Phone Resources

For those of you with smartphones such as the iPhone there are some dedicated apps out there. However, the ability to integrate the above programs with an iPhone are somewhat limited. Amazon.com, who provides much of the data for these programs, limits what can be synced with a phone. Both Delicious Library and Bruji had iPhone apps which removed from the app store at the request of Amazon. You can export your library as a PDF and store it on your phone.

Summary

Like I said in my introduction, some of you can exist without this software. I cannot. If these programs interest you download them and take the demos for a spin. If you have any other program suggestions especially on the Windows side of things, leave a comment and we can add them to the article.

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