Cataloging Collections

Most people have collections of some type.  But do they catalog their collections?

Up until a couple months ago I didn't have my music collection cataloged.  Considering that I have over 2,000 items in my collection, I was doing a poor job of what and the type of media I have.  I have seen other music collectors posting about the catalog for their collections, I decided that I should catalog my collection.  I tried several times to catalog my collection, but was not satisfied with the software or website that I was using.  I tried an Excel spreadsheet, but there were features that I wanted that I could do with just a spreadsheet.  I tried to with both discogs.com and allmusic.com, but was frustrated with the amount of extra work that I had to do when I came across an album in my collection that wan't in their database.

Earlier this year I was taking a college course that required me to use Microsoft Access to do some of my homework.  Because of that, I got Microsoft Access 2010 for free through the school.  A couple months ago I decided to try to create a database with it for cataloging my collection.  Different people track different information in their catalogs or databases.  I decided along with the album information, I wanted the database to hold all of the songs from each album.  I also like to see what songs from my collection were hits, so I wanted to track the songs that were hits.  I ended up creating three tables to track all of this information -- one for the album information, one for the songs and one for hits.  I created the layout for each table and a form to use for data entry for all of the information in under an hour.  If I ever decide I want to track more information in this database, all I have to do is create another table to store the information and establish the relationships with the other tables.

I haven't got to much from my collection cataloged yet, but am farther than I have done before.  I try to add some each day.

I'd like to know what my readers collect and if you catalog what you have.  If so I'd be interested on what you use for cataloging the information.  Please respond in the comments with this information.

The music that I've been playing while writing this post is the album Secret Messages by Electric Light Orchestra from 1983.