I'm guessing that there are many here who have relatively large collections
of those old paper repositories of words.
When we got back form our trip, a speculative purchase from China was waiting
at the PO.
<http://cgi.ebay.com/USB-Long-scan-laser-BARCODE-SCANNER-BAR-CODE-READER-255-/220431775090?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0>
I picked this design over another mostly 'cause the other design, of which
there are many, many listings, said it
required to be close to the printing to read and I'd seen the same basic design
at a lot of POS locations.
It came with a Programming book, but I haven't opened it. Plug it in a USB port
and Windoze Vista and 7 quickly install
a driver. Bring up any app with an input field, like a spreadsheet, point it at
at bar code, even from several inches
away, and it instantly fills in the field. Couldn't be simpler.
I'd already done some research on book cataloging apps. I downloaded a trial
version what looked like the best combo of
price, features, reviews for me, BookCat. Scan the ISBN bar codes on a few
books, click on the look-up button and it
downloaded the data from Amazon.
Simple and impressive enough that I paid for the app., so I could have a DB
greater than 40 entries. Hooked it up to
the netbook+, went in to one big bookcase, and started scanning. All the books
with codes went in quickly, those with
ISBN #s, but no bar code, a bit more slowly. the database is already at 421
books.
Those without either await manual entry. I'm thinking I may look them up by
author/title on Amazon, AbeBooks, etc., and
get ISBN #s for newer editions, to automagically get all but the pub. date for
most of them.
The time for data location and download for a few hundred books is fairly long,
but can go on in background. It's
certainly nothing compared to manual entry!!!
Out of 421 books, there were obvious errors in about half a dozen entries, all
variations of the title in the author
field. As it is a relational database design, it was easy to just edit and
select the correct author.
I haven't explored anything beyond simply getting books into the DB, but it
looks like a good catalog program so far.
Looks like one could run a small public library with it. It's going to make a
big difference in this household with two
people who have too many books.
Bibliographic Moose
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