Cataloging Your DVDs Online

I took a couple of hours today to try out two DVD cataloging sites. I used to belong to DVDSpot, but the developers of that site took everything offline in October 2007. I had located a couple of alternatives, but I'd never gotten around to testing them out. I decided to take a box of DVDs and try my hand at cataloging them on the two sites.

The first site I tried was DVD Count. This site's developer had been a DVDSpot user and needed a solution to manage his own DVDs so he developed one. I was hoping for more similarities with DVDSpot, but I found this site a bit clunky to use. I found myself manually having to enter about 10% of the titles in the portion of the box that I added to this site. One of the things that I really disliked about the entry form is that it defaulted to Afghanistan as the country. I accidentally forgot to change one of my manual entries, and there was no way to edit my error. I did like the detail that was included in the entries; however, it was a bit uneven because many of the entries were made by other users who provided varying levels of completeness to the record. I really don't blame them for skipping many of the fields because to a non-techy person, many of them were daunting and probably seemingly irrelevant. There was a place to add a cover image as you added entries.

The second site I tried was DVD Corral. I loved the ease of adding items. Their database seemed much more complete, but I also noted that some titles came up with incorrect titles. For example, Greater Vision Live at First Baptist Atlanta came up as Live at First Atlanta. Greater Vision wasn't even listed as performer and the word "Baptist" was omitted. There was no way to edit this. There was also no way to manually add an entry. You were prompted to send a message to the webmaster about the missing title, but that's kind of frustrating. There needs to be a way to edit an entry, and there needs to be a way to add an entry.

Online DVD cataloging sites are just not as friendly or as social as some of the book cataloging sites like LibraryThing. I think Tim and his crew need to come up with DVDThing! I'm not completely happy with either of the sites I used today.

Apologies for Lack of Posting

Wow . . . I just realized that it's been over a week since I posted. I've been busy. Can you tell? I was having headaches over last weekend and earlier this week. I think those have settled down. I've also been extremely busy at work and at church this week. I probably worked with over 1000 cataloging records for government documents this week in addition to teaching several students to repair books and other miscellaneous things that technical services librarians do. When I had the headaches, I just didn't feel like getting on the computer at night. I did index a few census records this week. Last night I came across one family where the mother was born in the summer of the year, and it said that the person born in the fall of that year was her son! That has to be a record. I think she was 3 months old when she gave birth if that was true. I believe that one was in Adams County, Mississippi, but it could have been an Arkansas record. Needless to say, I had a little chuckle as I keyed that information.

ACL 2007 Workshops

LibraryThing was down when the workshops for it were scheduled. I felt sorry for the presenter who had to rely on PowerPoint backup, but at least he had that! They were having a bookcover pile contest while it was down. We considered having a pile of librarians who were trying to access librarians while it was down and submitting that, but we didn't!

One of my colleagues and myself have talked several times about the workshop that showed how one library is using Facebook to reach its students where they are. I believe that we'll all be talking about how we can utilize Web 2.0 technologies to reach students in the coming academic year.

Another very interesting workshop was the one on customized toolbars which allow one to search things such as the library's online catalog, databases, and citation style guides. I'm already trying to figure out what we would need to include on one for our students. The presenters did tell us that it took time to develop them because of the code involved, but it is so useful that it will be worth the time.

I went to two cataloging workshops--one on authority control and one on metadata. I was very pleased with the direction the authority control presenter took. She approached it from the how it is changing and is likely to change perspective rather than it being a "how to" workshop. I know there were some in attendance who were looking for something a bit more hands-on, but having experience in the area, I was grateful for a more futuristic approach. The metadata was a good review for me of some of the skills that I'd been taught at a workshop back in about 2000. I really had not utilized this except in one digitization project since that time, and it was helpful to see the core elements of metadata for libraries once again.

The picture book update was great! This is the workshop where we get to pass around a lot of picture books which came out in the previous year. It's always interesting.