I'm looking at buying a cataloging program. I am looking closely at two, BookCAT and BookCollector. From what I have seen BookCAT is a supperior product, and unless I find something better it is the choice I'll make. BookCAT has all of the features I want that BookCollector is missing, but BookCollector also has all the features I want that BookCat is missing.

What BookCat has that BookCollector is missing:

Keywords.
The ability to edit the entries you search before they are entered into the DB.
Awards listing.
REPORTS!!!!!!
Advanced loan management (ie reserve, send e-mails/snailmails for late reminders, etc.)

But there are a couple items that I felt could easily be added to BookCat:
D.L. of book images (other products do it.) This is minor and unimportant.
LoC Classification. This is differnt then the LCCN. LoC Class is what universities use to organise their books, this can easily be DL'd from LoC. An example: PZ7.A42526Gr is the LoC Classification for Grover's Guide to Good Manners.
Dewey. This is a little more difficult as each library uses a slightly different dewey. IE one library puts "The Fugger News-Letters" under 940.22 K63 while another puts is in 940.2263. Even if you couldn't DL this (I'll assume it's not as easy as LoCC) then just having the field would be good enough for me.
Cover Price. Again, this can be DL'd. I Think Amazon has it, or LoC. Easy.
The last is the ability to search for a book that does not have an ISBN. I have many books that are older then ISBN. Some have a LCCN and I can search this way, but I have some that do not have an LCCN either. I would like to search by title/author.

The most important of the 4 to me is LoC Classification. The searching would be great as well. Dewey I can see others useing, but I prefer LoC Class myself. Cover Price and book images are just fluff to me. They would be nice, but are not important.

Thanks,

Jason

I just noticed one more thing that is missing. I've noticed a couple other people mention the editor. I'd like to see a "Credits" field. It would be like author, except it would have two fields "Name" and "Credit For". This would include editors, illustrators, photographers, etc. You currently have a translator field, I would add this in the same area. I think more books have illustrators and editors then have translators...

Jason

not if you live in a country like norway....

regards
shakespeare

Ciao Jason

Since the LoC Classification is not used worldwide, just like Dewey, I voted "No" in the Poll.
I have noticed that one of the most requested implement is related to additional sites to query and that makes me think that many people would not use LoC Classification anyway...I assume that i.e. european collectors would not find a reference Site in their Country that uses the same method...
I personally know many italian booksellers and none of them use LOCC...neither I remember having seen it stored in Italian, French, Spanish, etc Web Stores or Sites...
I also consider both LOCC and Dewey so difficult and not intuitive to be used by "normal" collectors...
I may abviously be wrong and I hope Fredrik will find the time to add that too, but speaking for myself I consider it neither urgent nor necessary.
A suggestion: since BookCAT can query the Library of Congress by either ISBN or LCCN codes, you could actually use a Custom field to store also the LOCC ( the same for Dewey's.. ) and if it will be implemented you should be able to use a query to move your codes to the proper field.
Have a great day ! :D

ok. Can I set it to DL that field from LoC when I do the query? If this is the case then that would work just as well.

Jason

Upon further inspection, this option was right in front of me and I missed it. Good job!

Since you cannot actually download the LOCC from BookCAT directly anyway, you can start storing your LOCC/Dewey codes manually for the moment: as I said, you will be able to move them in the proper field if/when it will be available. And you would have it stored anyway even if it won't be implemented...
Fredrik will surely report if/when it is implemented and if it will be possible to store LOCC and/or Dewey's directly in BookCAT.

To search & download a book using the LCCN code, you must simply enter the LCCN value into the "ISBN/LCCN" field and click on the "add" button, exactly like you do for ISBN's.
The search method acts exactly the same using ISBN or LCCN codes.

What I would do:
Search for a book in BookCAT using ISBN or LCCN number, i.e. : ISBSN=0201710986 or LCCN=2001267821 and download data for Elizabeth Castro's book named "XML for the World Wide Web".
Now I open a Web Browser, i.e. Internet Explorer on The Library of Congress Basic Search page that you can find here:
http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebreco ... PAGE=First
Now I simply copy the LCCN code from BookCAT ( 2001267821 ) and paste it into the LoC's "Search Text" field, then I choose "LCCN-ISSN-ISBN" from the "Search Type" field immediately below.
I press the "Begin Search " button and find the Book I queried using BookCAT.
Now I press the "Full Record" Tab so that I can find ALL available codes at Loc for that Book ( LC Classification-Dewey Class No-Other System No-Quality Code) and simply copy & paste the ones I need, in example LCC & Dewey, into my Custom fields in BookCAT.
Obviously you can copy&paste also ALL other missing information you are interested in...
That's all. I find it easy & fast !
If you need help to rename Custom fields in BookCAT to use for that purpose, please let me know

Hope this helps & have a nice day

OK. That's a lot more work then I was hoping for, but I guess I can do that. Once I get all the books input, it's easy to keep up on that, but getting even my small library input is time consuming without doing double searches in order to input a catalog number. Ah well...


Thanks, I did that already though.