A friend who is the marque expert for a brand of vintage bikes has thousands of records on index cards. He is worried about how easily it all could be lost (accident, death, etc) so I suggested making a database.

I could knock him up a database fairly quickly on the old version of FM on my Mac, but I need something that will be free and run on a PC/Mac (or possibly Linux) because he reckons a lot of the other marque experts in the vintage cycle community have the same problem, no money and lots of records that won’t mean anything to a non enthusiast, therefore likely to get chucked out.

Any recommendations?

(I’ve done a quick search, but most software never quite works like it says on the box. 🙂 )

LibreOffice Base is probably a reasonable starting point for something like that.

if the index-card system works well for him then Trello is an excellent (and free!) cloud-based version of that. It’s not a database but is searchable & sortable, and very intuitive. Easy to collaborate with other users too.

I’ve had a look at LibreOffice Base, and I think it’s too technical for the intended users, so it would be too easily broken. If I was doing it for myself, it’s probably what I’d pick though.

I was thinking of something that can wrap-up the database in one file – which would be possible in Filemaker.

Never used it but these guys call themselves an open source FileMaker

https://www.openxava.org/ate/filemaker-alternative

If he’s worried about it getting lost, put it online so other people can access it.

I’ve never played with it…but can’t you turn your FileMaker solution into a runtime for distribution? I think it’s only apllicable for single user environment. Might work though

Create a form in google docs that populate a spreadsheet?

The other thing I’d think of, if his main concern is that the knowledge is not lost is indeed to put it online somewhere. Wikipedia might be a good place to star, but I agree with others that online in some form would probably ensure it’s useful to more people and maintained for as long as it is useful to someone.

I’ve never played with it…but can’t you turn your FileMaker solution into a runtime for distribution?

You used to be able to, and indeed the Royal College of Anaesthetists did just that for years with an approved logbook based on FM. I think Mac OS13 broke the runtime system though.

jonnouk
Create a form in google docs that populate a spreadsheet?

A lot of the basics could be spreadsheet, but there is a lot of ancillary info, pictures, scans, multiple previous owners etc, so it will need to be a relational database.

It’s the sort of thing someone who knows a bit of code could kludge up, but the end-users are more expert in Victorian technology, and my code experience is years decades out of date. 🙂

I could prototype it in my old version of FileMaker while trying to find something end-user simple, but I’d rather not do it twice. I could run-time it, but the danger is deliberate obsolescence which is less likely with open-source.

A wiki would be an easy option.

It actually sounds to me like exactly the sort of thing that a non-relational DB would be ideal for.

Airtable might do enough for the requirement.

https://airtable.com/

poly
A wiki would be an easy option.

It actually sounds to me like exactly the sort of thing that a non-relational DB would be ideal for.

It would not be a public database. A lot on info is kept about various people’s valuable collections, and a lot of them want that kept private.

I thought about non-relational, but for example, there’s component databases to be linked in as well as others.

@epicyclo
As for the file uploads, i’ve just discovered it’s possible in Google Forms https://sites.google.com/site/scriptsexamples/home/announcements/google-forms-file-upload-feature

@jonnouk thanks, I can see that being quite useful.