I saw a link on Penny Arcade to a program called Delicious Library. It catalogs your books, movies, music, and games in a searchable library, showing them on a bookshelf. What makes this program really cool is that it lets you scan them in using a built-in camera. So, if your Mac (sorry, it’s Mac only) has an iSight camera on it, you click the camera button and a window comes up with several red bars on it. Line the ISBN barcode up with the red lines and it will scan in the barcode and look it up on Amazon. It then reads off the title (text to speech) and puts a thumbnail of the cover art into the library. If you don’t have a built-in camera, an external one will work, or you can buy a Bluetooth scanner to use with it.
So naturally I darted around my living room looking for things to scan in. Various Star Wars and Dresden Files novels. Several DVD’s. Couple of XBOX games. They all scanned in and were correctly identified. Then I scanned in one of our Harry Potter DVD’s, to which the computer replied “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2 disc special edition, Harry Potter 4.” Then a deeper voice said “Voldemort!” I have no idea how or why it did that, but it was really cool.
There is also an extension for it that creates web pages of your library. I added a “My Media Library” link to the top of the blog for people to check this out. There are only a couple titles in there now, and some of the screen shots are kinda squished, but you get the idea. One neat feature is the option to add a “I want to borrow this!” link, so you can have your own borrowing library amongst family and friends.