Tellico review

Whether it's a mass of vinyl records or a sea of spoons, collections can quickly become unmanageable.

One very popular New Year's resolution is to organise the things we collect. The problem is that cataloguing is a laborious task even for a small collection, and few of us ever finish it or keep the resulting records up to date. How can Linux help us get organised?

Enter Tellico. This comprehensive collection manager reduces the amount of work needed to catalogue nine standard collection types (from books to wine), and you can also create custom collection types.

For example, entering all the details for a book or CD collection is tedious. Tellico solves this ingeniously by enabling you to enter just the title or anything else to identify the work. It then goes to various sites, including Amazon, to find matches. Select the appropriate one and Tellico automatically populates its database with the entry, including a snapshot of the front cover. This makes entering data a joy.

We all lend CDs and books to friends and colleagues, and it's annoying to find your belongings among their collections months or years later. With Tellico, you can keep track of what you have lent to whom, which should settle any potential arguments without too much trouble.

Tellico's custom collection option is particularly interesting. It lets you select and name your own data fields. Each field has a number of properties, such as an option to allow auto-complete and to use it as a sort key to find entries in the collection.

The program can also import data from other cataloguing systems in a number of formats and export to HTML and XML, making it invaluable if you want to put details of your collection online. If you've already started cataloguing your CDs, videos, games or whatever and have realised how much work is involved, this could be just what you need to keep going and finish the job.