I picked up a new Macbook last week at the campus bookstore (splurged on the black one and snuck in on the Nano giveaway) and have been playing around with some of the new features like the built in iSight.
I downloaded the oh-so-fun Delicious Library and have been happily scanning in barcodes off the backs of my DVDs, books, games,and CDs to proudly catalogue my personal library.
For those that haven’t used Delicious Library, the software does the legwork of pulling metadata from Amazon for items you enter with either the ISBN or just a title, author, etc.
Delicious Library uses iSight or an optional Bluetooth scanner, if you have one, to read the UPC and off it goes to fetch the record info. It even comes with a circulation tracker so you always know whether it was Bob or Susan that didn’t return the DVD they borrowed last month. Way cool.
The perfect Mac candy for a librarian.
Tonight after work, I flipped on my computer and started poking around del.icio.us (the other delicious del.icio.us), coming across Ottobib. Kind of a neat tool too.
Pop in an ISBN, select a style, and bob’s your uncle – out comes a formatted reference. It isn’t hard to imagine a day coming soon when students will write their papers (write, assuming speech to text hasn’t taken off), scan the barcodes off the books they read using their cell phone or webcam, pick a citation style, and generate a bibliography for their term paper. Interesting stuff.
