Previously, before the great move of 2006, I had catalogued all of my books via Alexandria. But then we moved, and sold books, and bought new books, and I'd fallen woefully behind in updating. In GCStar importing is a snap. (Not just Alexandria, there are other options too.) You add to a current collection or create a new collection, and you can have it pick the default Alexandria directory or specify a file location. In Alexandria, I had organized my books in different libraries loosely by genre - cookbook, textbook, other, butGCStar has a genre tag which you can then group your collection by, or use any field to group for that matter. There are also fields for marking whether or not you've read the book, acquisition date, keeping track of borrowers, and a big comments field, which I found useful for jotting down basic plot outlines of books I've read. Other than importing books you can also enter books manually by ISBN or title and choose a database to search for more information. I mistakenly picked the German version of Amazon at first, as it was the first Amazon option, which had me scratching my head a little bit. (German for hardcover is Gebundene Ausgabe.) But you can choose from a whole list of places to look up info and set a default for future searches. The movie collections can import incredibly comprehensive data from imdb. Another useful feature for books is the series tag, which is great for labeling those never ending fantasy series. (Robert Jordan, I'm looking at you.)
For me the most useful feature of GCStar is the ability to define your own personal collection. I have spent some time working as a church musician, and finding an inexpensive yet useful program to catalog church choral music was a problem I never found a solution too. When you only have 200 bucks to buy new music and supplies for the choir, cataloging software goes to the bottom of the list, and I wasn't real happy with a spreadsheet or database option. (Although I tried.) GCStar solves this problem beautifully! You can define all the fields you want to your hearts content, and then if there is another field you want to add later, no problem. You're not constrained by categories like some commercial music tracking software. It's awesome. You want to track the dates the choir sings the anthem, no problem, just add the field.
Now say you're planning music for Lent, or a particular scripture, or your fabulous cello player is going to be home from college, or your put upon sole tenor is taking a vacation, it's a snap to use the group feature, and look at all the songs for Lent, or the ones based on II Kings, or have a cello accompaniment, or have no tenor part. This is incredibly awesome. GCStar why didn't you exist when I was working for the poor little church on the hill? You could have saved my eyes bleeding from trying to catalog crumbling choral music with excel!
Using GCStar you're only limited by what you collect and feel the need to catalog. If you collect Hummel figurines, you can take pictures of the little dust collectors and catalog away. The books and movies and music is pretty standard fare for us compulsive catalogers, but the capability to create personal collections I found to be extremely useful.Copyright 2007. This article is licensed for re-publication under the terms of the OPL.
