Organization

So, I have amassed a great number of music Cd's since their creation and the fade out of vinyl. After having replaced all of my vinyl LP's with their equivalent in CD format I have also continued collecting en mass at a hectic pace. Now I have the dilemma of where and how to store them. Initially I had a couple of IKEA "Billy" bookcases which seemed to do the trick. Then they were moved to some built in bookcases when we built the new house seven years ago. Now they are spilling out all over and take a lot of time to re adjust every time a new title appears on the shelf. So long, in fact, that it takes a whole day to sort them because I cannot just slip one onto the shelf. They are filed by artist last name first, first name last and were grouped from newest to oldest in relation to release date. With it being such an endeavour (almost like preparing to climb Mount Everest I am sure) they task gets put off until today when I started sorting and swapping and filing and whew I only got through the A's and barely into the B's.
The solution will be a media server which is like a hard drive with capacity in the terabyte range. At this pace I will probably need three or four to hold the 3000 to 4000 music Cd's (this is to hold the music and album art, liner details, etc.) I think I can do it along with iTunes to have a complete audio catalogue. I don't have the same rampant problem with DVDs but I do with books which will be another challenge and post. So, back to the media server. All is not over once the choice is mad3e. The next challenge is to load all of this data onto the server (task is to develop an estimate of man hours for this) which is somewhere around 3000 hours (rough estimate, eyeball, thumbnail). And then, what to do with the stuff once all is loaded and no longer required. I guess sell "the collection" to a used CD store, recycle somehow or advertise the collection on eBay. The other question is of course around cataloguing them all. There is software that uses scanning or bar code technology to scan them into a database so that a listing can be effected versus a manual load into MS Excel or MS Access (very labour intensive).
So, challenges and future posts!
If you have any comments, suggestions, ideas or want to help me with this momentous task- let me know. Drop a note, send a response or comment. I need all of the help I can get....