A friend of mine emailed me about a great little application this week that really appealed to me so I am hoping some of you will get the most out of it too.

First, a scenario.  You go to the video store, discount store, drug store or whatever store you visit and notice that they have the latest comic book character movie DVD on sale for a really good price.  You tell your wife how really neat it would be to have that movie to watch at home and she says, “Yeah, great idea.”  So you get it and when you get home you find out that you thought it was a really good idea to own that movie once or twice before.  So you now have multiple copies of it.  OK, that really happened to my wife and me one day a few months ago.

The program that Rick told me about last week is called, “Libra” which can be downloaded for free.  The slogan at Libra is, “organize your stuff, beautifully.”  OK, I don’t know about the beautiful part but it really does organize your stuff.

I am an avid DVD collector and have way more than I really need but it’s better than some other nasty habits I could have.  This program will organize your Books, DVDs, Games and Music collections.

I have only tried the Books (to see how it works for you) and DVDs (for me to use in real life) and they both work very well, as described on the Libra web site.

Starting with Books I found that if I enter the ISBN of a book, either the old ten digit version or the new 13 digit version, the book would be found right off.  Libra uses Amazon to find all of the data on each item so I guess if the item isn’t online there you won’t find it.  However, it found all of my 12 books and 149 DVDs (I told you had too many) without any problems.  I did notice that on some of the older books I needed to enter the title and find it that way.  For movies the UPC and/or ISBNs only worked about one time in every ten or so tries, so I stuck with movie titles to find them.

Once you finish finding everything you want you can view your Library with all of the available information (again at Amazon) loaded into the database.  So basically you click the picture of the book or DVD cover and it gives you all of the related info about the media, even with the next step.

The last neat thing about this program is that you can then export your data to different formats.  Pick from either an Excel workbook, a text file or my favorite, a Web Export.  I exported them as a Web Export and then loaded them to my website.  Go check out my book collection at http://DoubleClicks.info/libra.  Also there is supposed to be a colorful background on the website; however, it broke when I posted it to the web, but hey, it is free.

Let me know what you think about Libra.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 6:13 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.