What are the best tools for documenting hobby collections?
January 1, 2009 1:00 PM Subscribe
What are some good software tools and good practices for documenting and organizing personal hobby collections?
I've offered to help my mother start documenting her many hobby collections. She's got dolls, thimbles, tin cans, and I-don't-know-what-all. Some of it is valuable, and all of it is important to her.
She knows where it's all at, where she bought it, why it's important, what value it may have, and often even has receipts for items going back 40 years.
Just to be clear: this is not junk. She has many intentional and nice collections, and is interested in starting to get down in some form what she knows about it all, as she nears retirement. She's even buying a digital camera.
I'm not sure what software packages and general approaches are out there, and I'd like to learn about what some of the best ways of approaching this might be. Every time I think about it I either picture a crazy Excel spreadsheet (ug!), or a beautiful HyperCard stack purpose-built for exploring her collection (yay! -- but does HyperCard even exist anymore? I'm showing my age here.)
I'd love to help her get started on something very approachable that has a high-quality final output for searching, browsing, etc.
This isn't for a store, so a "merchant" slant to the tools would be ignored if present.
I keep thinking that the "collectors world" has got to have its own top solutions for this. Can you help me find it?
Oh, and: We both have Windows PCs, but if the most-brilliantest solution is Mac-only, that's fine too.
Thanks! Happy New Year!
I've offered to help my mother start documenting her many hobby collections. She's got dolls, thimbles, tin cans, and I-don't-know-what-all. Some of it is valuable, and all of it is important to her.
She knows where it's all at, where she bought it, why it's important, what value it may have, and often even has receipts for items going back 40 years.
Just to be clear: this is not junk. She has many intentional and nice collections, and is interested in starting to get down in some form what she knows about it all, as she nears retirement. She's even buying a digital camera.
I'm not sure what software packages and general approaches are out there, and I'd like to learn about what some of the best ways of approaching this might be. Every time I think about it I either picture a crazy Excel spreadsheet (ug!), or a beautiful HyperCard stack purpose-built for exploring her collection (yay! -- but does HyperCard even exist anymore? I'm showing my age here.)
I'd love to help her get started on something very approachable that has a high-quality final output for searching, browsing, etc.
This isn't for a store, so a "merchant" slant to the tools would be ignored if present.
I keep thinking that the "collectors world" has got to have its own top solutions for this. Can you help me find it?
Oh, and: We both have Windows PCs, but if the most-brilliantest solution is Mac-only, that's fine too.
Thanks! Happy New Year!
You could do this with Flickr using its tags and sets features for organization and searching.
posted by rhizome at 1:49 PM on January 1, 2009
posted by rhizome at 1:49 PM on January 1, 2009
It isn't Hypercard (which is dead), but Bento is a good way to make a small personal database, which is essentially what you want.
posted by bonaldi at 2:52 PM on January 1, 2009
posted by bonaldi at 2:52 PM on January 1, 2009
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by mippy at 1:45 PM on January 1, 2009