I started out trying to make a record for a photograph, and, my, aren’t there a lot of ways to describe a photograph. For a collection that already has some sort of organizing system, manually entering that much detailed info for each item in a collection is prohibitive. I imagine that there’s some way to batch upload preexisting catalog information from a CSV file, although that wasn’t readily apparent to me.

Next, I experimented with Loan In. Clicking around in the right side bar led me to a location record called “Creaky old shelf at the bottom of the stairs.” The Cataloging section of the record tells me that the creaky old shelf holds a painting and a camera. This two-way relationship (“x is on the shelf”/”The shelf contains x”) is really handy. It’s easy enough to find the location of a single item, but it’s rarer to be able to access all the items in a location. It struck me that the descriptions of the two items in the location vary in specificity. The painting is described just as “painting,” perhaps because no title is listed. The descritption for the camera, however, is “Bell & Howell 35mm Eyemo Motion Picture Camera.”  This description is found under title, which seems like an oblique fit to me, as cameras generally have a make and model rather than a title.