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  • 1000 Books and 500 Songs

    At a social event with colleagues there was a comment that collecting things and cataloguing them is a typical male pursuit. The question went around if we had anything we collected. I seem to collect books. I have a hard time throwing them away and register them in an Access database that recently passed 1000 records.

    One of my colleagues, a teacher of Swedish and History with a natural interest in literature also registered his books in a systematic way. He was interested in my database and how it was organized. This was just before the summer break and the end of my stay at the school. I never got the chance to show the database so the idea of putting it up on PMprojects.net as one of my projects seemed like a natural idea.

    Another part of the party was a musical quiz where the beginning of a song was played and we should write down the artist and song title. Half the songs where part of my personal collection of songs that I have on my computer, mp3-player and mobile phone and still I had a very hard time to recollect the artists and titles. My directory of songs that I like to listen to contained 503 files at the time. Hence the title of this page after a few removals; 1000 Books and 500 Songs. The book list have since been updated to adjust for new acquisitions so the title should now say 1000+ Books.

    The database for books is a simple relational database, a lot simpler than the database for teaching material I once designed but never used.





    Book records are registered under different subdomains that belong to different domains. Domains and subdomains are in separate tables where each record has an order number for a natural order when sorted: maths → physics → chemistry → biology and so on. Apart from author and title there is storage place and book type. The apartment (B) has only room for so many books, some are relegated for storage in the attic (V) and the Encyclopedia Brittanica ended up in my parental home. Some of the books are not really books at all, a few reside in a computer (D) as audiobooks (e) and some are just copies of larger articles that have been given a book-like appearance with plastic covers and black duct tape with titles on.





    John H. Conway,
    one of the authors of
    "Atlas of Finite Groups".

    A book that is
    very hard to get,
    so I had to make
    my own copy.