Reference database with user submitted data

[Mostin]

Hi, I wonder if anybody can help;

I want to set up a online database (or several) where any users can submit data containing several fields, (eg; title, description, subject1, subject2, subject3, etc...) and also the ability for people to perform searches of data already submitted with the ability to filter results by the fields selected.
These records of data should be able to be edited or deleted by admin (or admins). Registration before submittion of data should be optional.

One example would be if I were to use this for say, a library (books) where several librarians were indexing their collections, each person could type in the name of the book, the author, the genre and the year it was written, etc...
Then somebody could click on the site and tick which genre/s they would like to search (eg, romance, comedy, fantasy, or all 3) and the search results would show all books that have these types. Or, just search an author name and it will list all books of any genre written by them.

I could give 100 other examples of how such a system could be used, several searches around the net havn't provided me much I can use or link as an example that is quite like what I described. Maybe I am searching for the wrong type of things.

Unfortunately I am not a html/CGI/PHP expert so writing such code would not be easy for me.

Does anybody know of any existing scripts or similar existing systems available that I could customize that would allow this type of thing, or any other advice?

any help will be most appreciated, thanks