Wednesday, January 21, 2015

23 MS-Windows ® based cataloguing – HomeBase ® at the home base!

It would be nice if they could develop a basic program that has Lotus Agenda’s unique approach and capability (see previous post) of assigning items to categories based on text matching, as this is what automated classification is about. Until then, one has to fall back upon other database programs available for inventory management. One such, especially suitable for home libraries, is a simple and effective program called HomeBase, which is available free from AbeBooks at abebooks.com (American Book Exchange, if I am not mistaken). It is actually meant to make your book catalogue available to prospective customers on the AbeBooks site (for a payment); but we can use it in the meanwhile to develop our own stand-alone catalogues. In doing so, we may have to find certain work-arounds to emulate Agenda’s sorely-missed capabilities.

HomeBase (now in version 3) has fields for most of the details one would like to enter for a book, and then some. Being a database for book sellers and collectors, it has fields for binding, type of edition, condition of the book, size, and so on. Many of the fields are sortable, in the sense that the display or list View can be rearranged alphabetically in ascending or descending order according to Author’s name, or Title, or Publisher, to name a few possibilities. It also has fields for keywords, comment/description, and private notes, ISBN, etc., but since it’s obviously not geared to the classified library, it does not have a field specifically for the Dewey classification code or call number /shelf number. An obvious choice to enter the DDC number would be the Keywords field, and that is what I do, but it’s unfortunately not one of the sortable fields. Since the catalogue needs to be arranged by the DDC number (apart from the Author name), I suggest using one of the available fields for this; I am presently experimenting with Illustrator, which is a sortable field: you can display the list in the order of the DC numbers on this field with a key stroke; the Description/Comment and Keyword fields do not have this capability, which makes them less useful if you wish to arrange the books by Subject or Class Number. If there are a lot of books under each  subject or class number, it would obviously be good to put the full Shelf No in the DDC field (DDC number, three letters from Author name, year), so that the books can be arranged in the same specific order on the shelf as well as in the database view.

The plus point is that books can be picked up based on text searches in the Keyword and Description/Comments fields (and also based on Book Number, Title, Author/Illustrator, Publisher, ISBN, and Status fields); this means that you can get the program to list the books having a certain text string in any of these fields (termed a Filter), say ‘Wildlife’, and then sort them by Author or Year and so on. Incidentally, there is also a long list of category names already built in, so you could use these instead of the Dewey subject headings. Or you could add your own categories (up to a limit, I think it is 100).

All this is not as versatile as Lotus Agenda, where you could type any text desired  in the main Item field, and Agenda would automatically make assignments of the Item to different (pre-existing) categories based on text matches. In HomeBase, I don’t think there is a facility to save specific queries as Views (which is another of Agenda’s delightful features), one has to ask it to pick out items matching your criteria, and then work from there. But there is another facility in HomeBase that should be useful: you can assign each item to different Catalogues. One use may be to put in DDC Classes here; there is of course a limit to the number of catalogues, something like 100 I think. The idea would be, I suppose, to have a limited number of Catalogue names that could broadly follow the DDC Hundreds (with a few selected sub-disciplines to reflect the local interests, if there were a large number of specialized books). If the file starts getting too big, for instance, one may think of hiving off portions of it, say all Humanities (000-499) in one Catalogue, Science & Technology in another (500-699), and so on.

Another potentially useful feature in HomeBase is that it will locate the book in its own database and fill in all the fields if you give it some information like the international standard book number (ISBN). That requires you to register as a seller, however, which starts at 25 $ a month for 500 books (apart from a commission on sales), so you had better be a serious vendor with a good inventory and be prepared to work hard in case you want to recover your money! I guess eBay is a little easier to start as a small or occasional seller, as it allows you to list up to 50 items free and charges a 10% commission only on sales.


Disclosure: I’ve only played around with HomeBase, and not actually gotten down to filling in the database records for either my books or my music albums. I think that necessity will arise only if I intend to sell (and that too, through AbeBooks). I’m not very sure that it will be worth the effort at present to fill in all the books, merely to be able to search and locate automatically… my collection is not that big that books get completely lost sight of if they are misplaced on the shelves!

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