Tellico: A Collection Manager for Books/Videos/Stamps/Coins and More

For those Linux users who have chosen KDE as their desktop environment, a great program called Tellico exists to help you keep track of your collections, whether they be books, comics, videos, music, coins, games or something else entirely. Like GCStar (for Gnome), Tellico is able to query the Internet based solely on the title you input, saving loads of time and energy that would otherwise have been spent tracking down song titles, artists, actors, directors, and years.

Tellico - at least in Ubuntu - is easy to install. Simply go to the "Add/Remove..." option in the KMenu (if using Kubuntu), or the Applications menu (if using Gnome), and search for tellico. Select it, hit the button to install, and within minutes (or seconds, depending on your Internet connection speed), you'll be able to start a new collection database.

Tellico is incredibly easy to set up, and even easier to use. To start a new collection, hit the starred piece of paper icon in the main toolbar. This will cause a drop-down menu to appear, listing your collection options. In addition to the supported collection types listed above, Tellico also supports Bibliography, Sports Cards, Stamps and Wine.

After selection a category, Tellico is ready to search the Internet for whatever you want to enter in your collection. If you are building a movie database, simply type in the name of the movie you want to track. Tellico automatically searches Amazon.com by default, and spits back a list of all the results. For instance, searching for 'bourne identity' reveals quite a lengthy list, including different versions of the film. This includes both widescreen and full screen DVD versions, the HD DVD version, the collector's edition, and more. In my experience, searching Amazon.com provides a ton of results, which is nice, as it lets you put the exact edition of the movie you own into the database.

Once you have selected the correct version, simply hit the Add Entry button and you're ready to enter another title. It really is that simple. And fast. In fact, it's probably taken me longer to write this sentence than it does to type in a title, select the correct version, accept it, and start another search. Just to test the speed, I started a new database and built a library of roughly 30 movies in about 7 minutes.

One of the neat things about Tellico is that it has the ability to automatically search through the data pulled from Amazon.com and provide glimpses into your collection. For instance, with those 31 movies I entered, I can see that 15 of them were tagged "Action & Adventure," 13 were tagged "Drama," 14 were tagged "Science Fiction & Fantasy," while only one was tagged "Horror." Tellico also has the ability to give me lists of my collections based on other criteria. Were I building a book collection, I could organize my books by author, by publisher, by genre or even by binding!

When it comes time to actually do something with your collection, Tellico has a few options available. Among them is to export to a web page. This can either be done as one large page, or with each entry receiving its own page. Exporting was fast, and the resulting webpage was actually quite nice. I was given a basic index page, set to my current way of organization, which in this example was by genre. Each of the movie titles can be clicked, which brings up that movie's data page. The data page is quite attractive and - as a nice touch - does include a link back to the main title listing. The page itself includes information about the movie such as date of release, rating, language tracks, length and aspect ratio, in addition to cast, director and a fairly detailed plot summary.

In conclusion, if you are looking for this type of software, whether it be to keep track of your collection of priceless stamps for insurance purposes, or to be able to see which of your movies is missing, then Tellico is an excellent choice. It's fast, easy to use, provides attractive output options, and is - as a bonus to all of that - completely free! Tellico can be installed, as I mentioned, quite easily in Ubuntu. If you use another distribution, a variety of packages and the source code can be downloaded here.