Looking for ideas on how to automate cataloging of books & maps

[infobleep]

I have a collection of maps and guide books. In the past i have been maintaining a spreadsheet of maps I own, complete with copyright information, to identify the different editions.

I am finding this time consuming to maintain and so I was recently wondering if I could automate it in any way.

I am currently researching cataloguing software and wondered if anyone on here had used any such software and had any advice. The less typing I have to do the better.

Most of my books and maps don't have an ISBN number, let alone a scanable barcode, such is their age.

 

[John Webb]

I also use spreadsheets for recording most of my books, maps and I'm about halfway through a spreadsheet for cataloguing my 17,000+ colour slides. I can't think of any way of automating the process, but possibly taking a picture of the map publication details or of the book details and putting that in the spreadsheet might save you some effort? Or Optical Character Recognition perhaps from such a photo or scan?

 

[etr221]

There are I believe web-sites which will decode ISBNs, might be useful for works which have such, but if most of yours don't, this isn't going to save much. Otherwise I think it's a case of type, or scan + OCR (which might not save that much). Coding abbreviations might also save a bit...

Also might be worth hunting down book & map collecting sites and fora, where there are likely to people who've been through the same mill.

 

[infobleep]

Thanks for the replies. They are food for thought. I intitally looked at OCR and scanning but my search results didn't bring much back that was helpful. Then I hit upon book cataloguing to see what software existed.