Hi, Peter,
As discussed earlier, there are some free and inexpensive applications out
there that should allow you to capture existing MARC or other descriptive
metadata and load it into a database. A good place to start looking for such
software is the American Library Association's Automating Libraries: A
Selected Annotated Bibliography (ALA Library Fact Sheet 21, 2014), available
at http://www.ala.org/tools/libfactsheets/alalibraryfactsheet21. One product
mentioned there (although it doesn't seem to work with MARC data) is Music
Collector at Collectorz.com:
http://www.collectorz.com/music/ I have no idea how complete the Music
Collector database is (from which you can download records into your home
database), but according to one review, Amazon is also searched. There is an
optional barcode reader add-on.
A similar product is Readerware Music Database, which lets you scan in the
UPC barcode (or enter other info like Title, etc.). It then "collects full
information from a number of different sources including reviews, cover art,
full disk and track listings" for your home database:
http://www.readerware.com/index.php/products/details/music_details
Both these products offer free trials, and both are very inexpensive.
Another option is CollectiveAccess, which, although it's intended primarily
for archival and museum collections, can import MARC and other data (how
simple this process is I'm not sure): http://collectiveaccess.org/. You
could download MARC records and export them in various formats with the
wonderful MarcEdit, which is free: http://marcedit.reeset.net/ Presumably,
you could then load them into CollectiveAccess.
As far as I know, All Music Guide metadata isn't free, but if that is
inaccurate, I'd love to be corrected.
I hope you find software that works for you, Peter, and if you discover
something fabulous, please let us know!
Marsha Maguire (retired LC cataloger)
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