Online Collections

I've been looking for a good website that book collectors could use to catalog their books. LibraryThing—in which Abebooks has a financial interest—makes it very easy to catalog recent books with an ISBN issued in the US. However, the site is aimed at readers and doesn't distinguish between editions, nor does it offer many opportunities to add that information.

A group of Canadian libraries developed some software to catalog ephemera collections on the web. The program, called Streetprint, is open source and free (but you have to have a web server running PHP and MySQL to use it). I tried it out, cataloging some of my RK Narayan collection. It's pretty good, but it would be nice if it had a few more fields. The biggest drawback, though, is that you have to make your own thumbnails of your images and uploading images is cumbersome. And the instructions are for version 2.1 while the current release is 3.0.

Now on to the scene comes Squirl.info, a site the combines some elements of blogging software and social networking to help collectors catalog their collections. I asked Lew Jaffe (the Bookplate Junkie), an early adopter, what he thought of the site. He said, "I am very pleased with the Squirl site. It is easy to use and very efficient. In addition, it is attracting a diverse group of collectors."

Based on that recommendation, I set up an account (very easy) and uploaded two books (also easy). The site works well and automatically makes thumbnail images of your pictures, but there are a few drawbacks. To put in a publication date, you have to enter the month, day, and year from pull-down menus. In most cases, we don't know that information so it would be nice to be able to enter what is known for a particular book - sometimes only the month and year and often only the year. The site also allows only allows dates back to 1700 and just one picture per item. The picture limitation is particularly frustrating. Often you'd want to show the jacket, binding, title page, along with a detail of an issue point or a signature. In all, not a very collector-friendly feature.

The fields offered are also somewhat limited - even more so that Streetprint - but it's much easier to use. It's a good start. I hope they get better.

Here are a few bookish collections you can look at:

 

The Bookplate Junkie (blog ) reveals he also collects telephone dialers
Manuscript Americana
An impressive collection of autographed Sports Illustrated covers
Autographs

Then there are goofy things like Dead Bugs.

Comments

[Impressive R K Narayan Collection]

Hi Scott...You have the most impressive RK Narayan collection...must have taken you a long time..congratulations..Saj