Thanks to a recent conversation with fellow blogger/reviewer at Creative Madness, I bought myself a nifty but inexpensive (under $10) little barcode scanner called a CueCat™ and Readerware™ book catalog software, thinking that I could catalog my extensive library quickly. After all, it would be so easy to scan the barcodes and let the software do the rest of the work. Well, that portion of the project is easy. What I didn’t take into consideration was the sheer volume of books I own and getting them to the computer a stack at a time to scan. Maybe I should load the software on my laptop and take it to the books instead. At this point I have cataloged 475 books and I haven’t started on the ones in bookcases yet.

The scanner works great most of the time and beeps when it successfully reads the barcode into the Readerware™ program. I can scan a batch at a time in the auto-catalog mode then let the software do its stuff. It scans selected internet book sites such as Amazon.com, finds the title, author, an image, and info about the book and automatically imports it into my database. How long would that take to do myself? I can see that it will possibly take months to get my entire library cataloged and just maybe I will actually decide to let some of the books go to a new home. I will be scanning new ones in as soon as they come into the house. Oops, I forgot the one that UPS delivered today!

This is a screen shot of the thumbnail view of my library (part of it). So now you know what happens when “Gadget Girl” finds a way to merge her love of technology with her love of books. Now if someone would just build me more bookcases and a room to put them in.