Why am I creating a public database for my physical media?
I'm currently working on a (massive) project documenting the physical media I own (books, movies, music, video games), calling it my library. As I started going through the process of documenting the video games I have with me (a combination of Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, and DS titles), I asked myself:
"Why am I creating this database if I'm not tracking my stuff?"
There is one quick answer: because I can. I'm building this with Obsidian and entering the data with both assisted methods (plugins for movies and books), and manual entries (video games). I wanted to play around with Obsidian and this seemed like the perfect thing to build with it, separated from my day-to-day vault. In short, this is a for-fun thing.
It's also an ongoing project, something that won't be finished for quite some time. I think eventually I'll catch up with the video games, but I'm always adding more media. I have so many movies, books, and music1 that it will take me a long time to add those.
Getting back to the question about tracking - the reason I opted not to track things such as reading status, etc. is because I didn't want a performative act. That info is for me. I didn't close the last.fm link but I'm not actively sharing that either. This database, on the other hand, is just that: a database.
The only reason I'm making it available online is because I would find it somewhat interesting if someone else did the same thing, and I think it's easier to find things through the website this way than digging through the Obsidian vault. The search function on the website is surprisingly good. If I type "mario" it brings up all the notes mentioning Mario in any capacity. I could do that in Obsidian but I don't find the search function very user-friendly.
Having said all that...I realize that I have a "currently reading" page in the library. I'm going to delete that as soon as I hit "post" on this. Keeping a currently reading list is just the same as putting that up on Goodreads or The Storygraph. I'm still listing books as "read" and giving them a rating, but that's more for me than for anyone else.