LibDB

Via The Shifted Librarian comes this link to the LibDB project. It is pretty early in the project, but it looks quite interesting. From the description:

“This is the development wiki of LibDB, an open-sourced Perl/MySQL library and asset management system based on and inspired by the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (pdf), triples from the semantic web, and “the end-user doesn’t, and shouldn’t, need to know this stuff”. In English, this means that you’ll be able to smartly and easily catalog your movies, books, magazines, comics, etc. into your own computerized “personal library”.

Like many geeks of my particular bents, I have written my own systems for managing databases of stuff. I did it once for comic books, kind of half did it again later for books and then abandoned it. It would be nice to have one general and standardized way of managing all “assets” like this once and for all. I suspect that if/when this standardization happens, lots of people would begin to do really cool things that would be sharable amongst ourselves. For example, once the database structure for this has been set as it appears to have been, it’s a pretty simple matter to make a matching XML schema. Suppose there were nice web UI’s to tools that would manage these asset databases, complete with the ability to share catalogs via XML. Libraries could export their lists to each other of what was available for loan simply with standard free tools, inventory lists could be imported and exported simply, “wish lists” could be in standardized formats. The mind boggles at the possibilities.

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Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.