I'm making a site that is basically a library of various public domain books, audio files, and videos. Most of these resources will probably not be hosted on my site. At least not the audio and video files. I just need a CMS that will allow visitors to sort the resources by type (text, audio, video), author, title, and subject, and also allow tagging.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I would like to suggest you Subdreamer CMS. It's a paid CMS which is considered one of the best and has a wide slection of mods and themes.

But if you don't like to pay for it, you can use PHP-Nuke, though it's not my favorite.

Check out http://www.opensourcecms.com/. You can try out various demos of content management systems without going to the trouble of installing them anywhere. Best of all, the CMS on that page are all free and open source

Pay for an CMS? dont make me laugh!!
Why pay for anything when Joomla is the best CMS and its free, and so are thousands of extensions for it.
Joomla will be able to do everything you mentioned for your site and more and more and more
I know im a bit of Joomla prophet but it really is that good! I have tried soo many you wouldnt believe ina quest to find the best CMS for my customers.
I have built 5 sites already on Joomla and I am workingon another 3, its my platform of choice for my business these days, If I can I make every site Joomla if the customer will allow it.

I agree on joomla, I've used a handful of others (free ones, that is) but none of them compared in the end in my opinion. Some had more flexibility and some had a higher user friendliness level, but joomla hit a perfect blend in my opinion that made it a great choice. Really if you go with any of the commonly known ones I cant imagine it posing a problem, but if you want my recommendation its joomla all the way.

Is that so? Subdreamer is much better than Joomla... if you have ever seen it. You should pay for a CMS for the same reason you pay for a forum system.

If you are looking for a CMS system I would probably look into joomla, its a open source and I believe also offers a trial so that users can try out what their tool offers web developers. From what I noticed its a very complex tool that takes time to get used to, it features a chunk load of features that will make your brain swell just trying to grasp it all. But once you master it like some of my colleagues have, you can probably produce websites at a very fast rate compared to if you were to build it from scratch. Out of all the content management systems that are available out there I believe that this joomla is offering even the beginner of web developers to develop websites like pros. Joomla also an opensource so that users can even modify their tool to their specific needs if they have the knowledge to do so.

I believe joomla is the best (1.5)
Has lots of extensions (modules, templates, components and plugins)
Easy to use
Content management is more than excellent , you can add categories, sections and articles and add each directly to the menu.
I haven't tried any of the paid CMSs, but joomla is enough.

I'll add my vote to Joomla here. There are a lot of templates to choose from, it's easy to set up, so on and so forth. Joomla also seems to be one of the easier CMSs to learn to use (compared to Drupal, at least...). There's also a lot more that you can do with Joomla if you look around for extensions and the like. I'd say checking out that link ethergeek gave is a good idea: you might as well figure you what suits you most. :-)

And personally, I would definitely not consider a paid CMS. At least not until after you have tried all the available free ones and decided that you don't like any of them (that is seriously not likely .)

Joomla is a fantastic choice if you are looking for a free CMS.

The number of extensions for it is really impressive and I think that you'll find it very easy to use.

It does have a few very important downfalls.

You link modules to specific sections of your website based on the menu links that you create. Each menu item has ad ID and that ID is what the modules are linked to so if you goto menu item 23, then all of the modules linked to that menu item will be displayed on that page.
This works great unless the item ID is not used or you have an old link to the page that was replaced and the item ID is no longer the same. Then none of the module specified for that item will be displayed. Only the global items will show...

The second problem is the user group system and permission settings. Again, the system was built on a very easy to use and develop method but lacks the versatility required by many webmasters today. You have 3 user groups. The backend lets you specify more user types but in the end, they fit into one of three groups. Public, Registered, and Special. Registered adopts all permissions of Public and Special adopts all permissions of Registered. So the system is actually set up in levels. Which means, you cannot display something to the Public without the Registered and Special users seeing it too. Additionally, you can't display something to Admins without all Special users seeing it!

I had hoped that the newest version of Joomla (1.5) would have addressed these problems but it seems that they only fixed things that aren't apparent to the average user. The updates were important but like I said, most webmasters won't notice the majority of the changes since they were optimization and security updates that don't show.

Having said all of that, I am a Joomla user and have developed a number of extensions for the system. Even though it has these issues, it is the foremost Free CMS available and easy to use.

vujsa