Five Open Source Apps to Manage Your Collections

Comic books, DVDs, old vinyl albums, Star Wars figurines -- collecting things is fun. What's not fun, though, is keeping track of it all. When you have large collection of anything from books to steampunk LEGOS, it's important to keep an inventory so you know what you've got, what you still need, and who borrowed something. Here are five open source collection management apps to help you organize your stuff.

Tellico - This KDE app comes with handy templates for managing your book, wine, video game, coin, or stamp collection. Import data in several formats including CSV, RIF, PDF, and even directly from IMDb and Amazon. Tellico exports to HTML, XML, Bibtex, and more.

Griffith - Keep your movie collection in order with this app that automatically grabs film information and cover art from the Internet. Griffith lets you sort, filter, and search your collection, and integrates with databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite3. Its multi-language support allows for easy access to international movie databases like Italy's Cinematografo and the French Web site Allocine.

GCstar - Designed for use on systems with gtk2-perl, this app helps you maintain all kinds of collections from stamps to mini-vehicles, and comes with several default templates to get you started. Like other collection management apps, GCstar's plugins will fetch information from Internet databases, or you can write your own plugins in Perl. If programming isn't your thing, you can ask a developer to make you one in the forums.

Alexandria - If you need a simple app to manage your monstrous book collection, then check out this Alexandria for the GNOME desktop. It retrieves book data from several online bookstores and libraries including Amazon, AdLibris, and the U.S. Library of Congress. Search your collection via ISBN, keyword, title, or author, and export XHTML Web pages of your libraries and theme them with CSS. Alexandria includes several language translations and even supports "keyboard wedge" barcode readers.

Sisimizi - This Windows-only video game database app comes packed with lots of handy features including a scripting system to fetch game info from the Internet, customizable data fields, and loan manager. Sisimizi supports several import and export formats, and will even export your entire catalog in HTML for displaying on Web sites. Games can be grouped an filtered by platform, genre, or year, and will even aggregate data and display statistics in bar or pie charts.

Flickr image courtesy of Ian Wilson.