Keeping Life Organized: Family Media Database

I've got a ton of books and movies, and my friends and family know it.  They love to come and browse the "library" and borrow a title or two every now and then.  I needed a simple and easy way to keep track of who I've loaned items out to and to just keep a visual inventory of what I do have.

Keep Your Life Organized: Family Media Database

My inner geek came out and I had a marvelous idea: a family media database.  Microsoft Access is a database management program that uses a graphical user interface to make things a bit easier on the user.  Even less tech savvy people can use this program and make their own database.  I had the advantage of taking a college course on Access (as it is a requirement for my major), but Microsoft has some helpful training videos and articles for beginners readily available here (Link applies to the new 2013 edition of Access).

In this post, I'll show you what I've done to create my personalized media database.  I've taken screen snippets from my database to show what I've done.

Here, you can see the tables I've created that hold the records for the database.  Creating the links between related tables is very important in order to create queries to customize the information you see.  Be sure to create relationships for the tables that need them!

For each book in the books table, I enter a unique ID number beginning with B (for book, obviously!) and the book's title, author, and genre.  I also indicate what format the book is in (paperback, hardcover, or e-book), whether it is part of a series, and the series name (if applicable).

The movies table is much like the books table.  Each movie has its own unique ID number beginning with M (for movie - I'm so clever!), the movie's title, year made, genre, and rating.  I also indicate the format the movie is in (DVD, Blu-Ray, or Digital), any distinctive notes about the movie, and whether it is a 3D movie or not.

As I mentioned earlier, relationships are very important in my media database.  Without the relationship links, these queries I have created wouldn't work.  I'm not going to go into how to create the queries (you can find that information yourself in the training documents I mentioned above) but I will tell you why to create the queries.  Each query is run when you open it, meaning any records that apply to the query will be shown, even if they have been added since you created the query.  I've set up a few queries to show me different sets of information: which 3D movies we have, which movies are Blu-Ray, which movies are on DVD, which books are parts of a series, list of any duplicate movies (owned in two different formats), and which books or movies have been loaned out.

This database makes keeping track of things so much easier.  I can find the information I'm looking for with the click of a mouse rather than searching through shelves and boxes.  You don't have to stop with media, you can keep a database of whatever information you'd like to keep organized - use your imagination!

Let me know what kinds of things you use a personal database for!

xo,

C