Hello everyone,

Long time lurker, 6th (or so) time poster. I would like to tell a story of me, my background, and my newly made system.

Ive been in "the business" of collecting my childhood in the forms of Dungeons & Dragons, for the last 2-3 years. My collection have been growing steadily in the years, partially fueled by large batches from deals found in the local "new&used" papers. I started my career with ebaying, getting the occational item every week or so, sometimes 5-6 items per week -- sometimes 3-4 months with nothing bought. I seldom read in my found treasure, however some items have a special place or interest in boyish heart, and are read thoughrouly -- some I even collect as many as I can, like Rules Cyclopedia and every B 1-9 module I find (the later however -- not from ebay as it would be an endless shopping spree).

My background is 18 years of programming in any language that you can compile, script or emulate, with only a short break to get a 3 year education as Librarian. I work daily with search engines, findability and databases.  Up til now, this has been completely separated from my hobby.. but then came the day:

I got a large batch; for around 80£, I got a giant crate of AD&D -- basically adding 40% to my collection in titles and volume. I had been keeping records of my collection with Google docs, entering sparse information like the TSR stock number and if available; the module number. However -- now everything changed; I had by mistake (or lack of thought) merged the entire 40% into my collection without entering data into my google docs spreadsheet. Oh no -- now I had to do it all over again, everything has to be re-entered. Then it hit me; im a programmer - im a librarian -- why not use my skills and make a better system -- a precise system -- something that would be able to help me when Im out shopping -- or to help me when im selling items (which I haven't started yet -- but I have to, as the wife doesn't approve of my yearly D&D budget).

The system itself does not have a name yet. It is, in the time of writing, still in development. It is not deployable for anyone else but me, at the moment, but I could change that within long. The prime feature is, it reads barcodes. Both the ISBN and the GSIN-12 barcodes, as well as an internal barcode system Ive made for all my items. If the barcode is an ISBN, it will itself download all the information from Google Books and Amazon (however this information is sadly not very good). If the barcode is only GSIN-12 ("shopper"-barcode -- not unique nor can it be converted to ISBN easily) the ISBN can be entered manually -- and then the information can be retrieved. Every item I have, I can tag with a "Batch-name", the Batch-name I can tag with a price -- this is then calculated into a average price per item of this particular batch. Also, if an item has been sold, I can enter the sell price of the item (it's a simple system -- any difference from P&P charged and actual P&P has to be calculated manually). When I am out on a shopping spree at my favorite used & new RPG dealer, I can use my iPhone to scan barcodes the barcodes of whatever I want to buy, to see if its already in my inventory.
For every item in my inventory, the following can be manually set: Barcode, ISBN, Internal Barcode, Title, Description, Condition (VGC / Used / etc..), TSR Stock number (like 9712), Module Name (B1, B2, etc), Author, Pages, Batch-name, Average Buy price, Item Buy price (if eBay'ed in large batch -- and excluding postage), Sell price

The next thing that is up, is to make an actual API where "everyone" (that means, - me) can make lookup. This API will have "perfect" normalized data of TSR products and everything else, including images and everything.  Google Books and Amazon really has messy messy data from their APIs -- this needs to be cleaned up very much. Also I would like to integrate eBay for all items in my "wanted" list -- as well as ebay watcher for possible sell prices for my current items. This and a bit more is planned for the future.

This was my story -- all that Is left is ask a question to the community: what am I missing? Where do I go from here? Have I just reinvented the wheel?

For the most part it seems like a non-starter. Certainly not something I could imagine D&D buyers using. Unless you can use the data you collect to produce an information product that is faster and more accurate than a user can already achieve on the forums and with existing online search tools, I don't see a site or service that will be frequented by people. As far as information is concerned, most of it is already available quickly and easily from a number of resources, and with a bit of cross referencing, most of it is accurate and complete with only a little bit of a learning curve. So I don't quite see what you intend to achieve, unless it is purely an academuc exercise.

I can understand building a website just for fun. I did it myself a while back, but at the end of the day, it isn't frequented often, has no public participation built into it, and is incredibly time consuming to develop only to reproduce what other sites have already achieved. It's fun at the time to build, but don't expect anythng profound, and don't expect any form of financially marketable use or return.

There have been people archiving D&D by hand for decades, referencing and cross referencing data to suit their particular bailiwicks.