[Sca-cooks] Way OT Book Question

[Stefan li Rous]

Kiri asked me in reply to my comments about the book database program  
I am now using:
  ======
Stefan li Rous wrote:
 > I've run into this problem as well. I've tried two different general
 > purpose database programs and one specialized for books (Readerware).
 > The problem was that each time I had to start over, for various
 > reasons, I wanted to keep straight which books had been entered and
 > which hadn't. I simply started by writing on the inside cover of the
 > book "DB" and the date it was entered into the database. Since I'm  
now
 > on the third database, I'm now writing "DB3-" and the date. I've now
 > wised up and also started marking the books in pencil instead of pen.

Just out of curiousity, why are you having to re-enter things when you
change databases?  I'm not familiar with library programs, but do know a
little about databases (Oracle, MySQL and a very minimal bit about
Access).  Typically, with most databases, you can import data from
another database into the new database.
======

The first database program was one that I'd bought in a package with  
another program. I had several hundred of my books entered when I had  
my disk crash which some of you may remember me mentioning here. I  
had been backing things up to CD-ROMs, but after the crash I found  
that other than a few items I hadn't backed up most things for about  
two years. It certainly hadn't seemed that long. After putting  
together a new system I might have continued with this initial  
database program a bit longer, but it was a low-cost package I'd  
gotten as a bonus for buying something else and it really wasn't set  
up to handle large databases. So I bought a copy of Filemaker.  
Unfortunately, the book database program they included was minimal,  
but I started to use that with the idea of modifying it as I had the  
time.

Since I had not re-entered many of my books into the new database for  
the original program, I didn't try to translate from one database to  
another.

After I had a hundred or so entries in my Filemaker database, I saw a  
review for Readerware. It didn't take me long to decide to download  
it and try it (it's available as shareware) and then only a few days  
longer to go ahead and order the program on disk and get the OCR wand  
they sell with it ($10, I think). Since the program only needs you to  
enter the ISBN or Library of Congress number, either by hand or by  
using the wand if the book as the right barcode, I decided it wasn't  
worth trying to figure out how to export and translate the database I  
had in Filemaker into a form that Readerware could use.

I do have a few books that had gotten entered into the Filemaker  
database which didn't have ISBN or Library of Congress numbers, but  
it still will be easier to just type all the info for each of those  
books directly into Readerware than to figure out the translation  
stuff. I've got to do that anyway for the pile of books which doesn't  
have a number or which has a bad number.

=====
So, unless your database was
damaged or destroyed in some manner...and you don't have a backup (BAD
Stefan!), you shouldn't have to re-enter the information.
=====

Yes, BAD, BAD Stefan. I think I've tried to encourage folks to learn  
from my mistake and for them to do a backup several times since then.  
But alas, I've slaked off myself. :-( Like the CDs, where I stopped  
backing things up because I was going to get the DVD backups going  
"Read Soon" and that was when the drive decided to destroy itself.  
Well, I've been planning on moving to a RAID-1 mirrored system for  
backups "Real Soon" now, so I don't have to spend all that time  
swapping in and out DVDs...

Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas           
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****