I’ve been playing around with a new program: Delicious Library by Delicious Monster. Not only does their company have a really cool name, but the program does some really cool things. Basically, it’s a library management program. It helps you track your books, DVDs, CDs and video games. It’s useful for tracking who has borrowed what and when (which is why we’re looking at it for the expanded office environment). But the really cool thing is how it handles data entry.
Instead of having to type in titles, all you need to do is hook up your digital video camera to your computer, point it at the UPC barcode on the book (or DVD or CD) and the program will go ‘beep’ and grab as much information as it can off of the web. Including tiny thumbnail pictures of the book covers or album art.
It takes a bit of finagling some times to get the camera steady and close enough to the barcode to trigger the beep, but once you do it’s kind of addictive.
One minor downside is that it shoves everything into the same library database, so there’s no easy way to maintain a ‘work’ library and a ‘home’ library on the same computer. I’ll definitely be playing with this program for a while, and I’ll post here if there’s anything else that crops up.