Dumping your collection of audio CDs, movies, magazines, books and games in the attic may be convenient if you run out of space to store them. But when a colleague or friend wants to borrow a particular title, you might need to turn the attic upside down, cobwebs and all, just to search for it. Your mum would then nag you for weeks. If you want to avoid this nightmare and be in control of your collection, you probably need to seek for some library applications that can help you to manage and categorize your stuff. You could house your collection in a proper place, and catalogue or organize them effectively via the library software available.

Libra is one of the useful library applications to help you to digitally organize your collection of books, audio CD, games and movies into an attractive visual catalog. This application is free for non-commercial users. Users can use Libra to create a digital library to keep track of their collection, e.g. where the stuff is kept, who has borrowed your favorite movies, how many CDs you have purchased, etc. Libra will help you to build a database either via your export of the catalog (if you have built one) to it or you can use a webcam or barcode scanner to scan the product information and Libra will retrieve the product information and add the retrieved info and picture to your library. The visual catalog for your collection will have all vital product information such as title, cover photo, etc. Once you have created your catalog, you can do searches from the database, print catalog pages and share your collection online.


Screen shot for Libra

Besides Libra, a pretty similar organizer software designed to do cataloguing is MediaMan. It is loaded with features such as virtual-shelf visual rendering of items, automated content retrieval, webcam barcode scanning, nested categories, tags, and flags for rental management. It is quite powerful and is also able to retrieve content from Amazon. However, unlike Libra, MediaMan is not free. It only offers a 30-day trial and is priced at $39.95.

Although there are other organizer software applications available other than Libra and MediaMan, most of these applications do not allow you to do content retrieval and you need to spend some time to manually create the catalog.