Open Media Lending Database
My friends and I have been getting DVD players and DVDs. We’ve been talking for a while about building a database at CFRQ to list the DVDs each of us own, and to keep track of lending. The discussion came up again last night over cards, so I did a bit of digging…
As per normal, someone else not only had this idea, but wrote the software. The Open Media Lending Database is a PHP + MySQL solution to the problem that is pretty sophisticated. It supports multiple “media” types: DVD, VHS, CD, Games, Books, etc.. You can add data by crawling IMDB and Amazon.com. It supports multiple users. There are some features that we don’t need, but overall it looks like it will be very useful.
So I installed it :-)
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Cool, now all I need is someone to input many hundreds of entries. Someone should have a UPC list to IMDB mapping or to this database then I could just scan them all in, well except for my collection of off-the-air pbs stuff on VHS.
I also tend to have sections where things are filed (e.g. kids VHS, kids DVD, anime, war, documentary, movies, concerts) so the stacks have a more at-a-glance physical usefulness to them.
The only problem with loaning stuff to friends is that (well I’ve never had these problems, but I thought I should mention them to would-be librarians) is inopportune bit-rot. For example, I had one DVD that was part of a bad batch and stopped working of its own accord. It was a $60 rare DVD, which I managed to eventually get replaced through the distributor, but suppose a friend had it when the bits went bad? If it’s rare and out of print, do I risk copying it prior to lending it and having the thought police show up at the door? Which reminds me, I have a (big budget) movie on VHS that was actually recalled and is now totally unavailable. oooh ahhh. Same for the case of a Disney VHS.
Then there are children under 3. It’s taken only about 2 months to teach her otherwise, but Megan started out (of course) by not holding the DVDs by the central hole and the edges. So far all finger prints have been corrected, but I lost one driver CD (irrelevant since it’s out of date anyway) to an apple juice spill.
What about the potential to psycho-analyse a collection? Fortunately, most of my questionable videos can be blamed on the kids or misleading packaging, yeah, that’s it.
-jok
The software does have a barcode interface; there’s a collaborative DVD barcode database out on the internet. I haven’t tried it, though.
The library is closed to a small group of people with mutual trust, so I’m not concerned about the bit-rot issue. This is mainly a way for each of us to remember whom we’ve lent DVDs to. :-)