Create a digital book catalog
My wife recently decided to organize our book room (2000+
books scattered about) into an actual, catalogued library.
Needless to say, neither of us had the time to do this by hand.
Fortunately, I remembered that
CueCat barcode scanners were
available on eBay for about $10.
You can get them on LibraryThing for about $15, if you feel like supporting the cause.
These little devices plug in like a USB (or PS/2) keyboard.
When swiped over the barcode on the back of a book, the CueCat "types"
it in and then "presses" enter.
That barcode on the back is the book's ISBN,
and it uniquely identifies the book and its edition.
It's easy to scan dozens of book barcodes per minute once you get into a rhythm.
If you want to scan in your library, then scan all the barcodes into a single text file.
The Notepad program that comes free with Windows works fine for this.
If you're an Apple user, TextEdit works.
If you're running Linux, cat > codes.txt works.
Once everything is scanned, you can upload that file to LibraryThing, and it creates
a digital catalog of your entire library automatically.
LibraryThing pulls info from both
amazon.com