How to Use Barcodes to Catalog Your Collection
I attended a Great Books college. What that means is, after graduation, I left campus with a degree— and a library. These books not only contain nearly every great Western thought that ever was; they contain precious college memories. You want to borrow one? That's fine, but hand it over first so I can scan that barcode. A barcode scanner and Booxter is like having a personal librarian.
Booxter is a software from Deep Prose that helps users manage their book, movie, music and comic book collections using multiple libraries and smart lists. While Booxter has always supported both handheld and wireless barcode scanners and iSight video cameras to quickly add large numbers of items to a collection, Version 2.7 marks a significant upgrade. Now, the free companion iPhone app, available from the App Store, scans barcodes and sends them directly to Booxter, wirelessly. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, you now have a barcode scanner. The latest version also includes improvements such as adding Amazon Italy as a search site for books, music and movies, improving online searches, and enhancing the user interface.
Booxter is the perfect example of an affordable tool that allows the Everyman to leverage the power of barcodes to increase productivity, organization—quality of life. In a world so populated with things, it helps to have a tool to help you manage them. Booxter enables users to scan the barcodes on their collection with a bluetooth or USB barcode scanner, the built-in iSight camera on a Mac or even a smartphone to create a database which then allows the user to create and view filtered lists, keep track of lent out items, view items on the go with a mobile phone, even play a quiz game based on their collection.
For years, the power of the mysterious barcode was relegated to warehouses and retail environments. Today, thanks in large part to mobile barcode scanning on smartphones, barcode technology is available to anyone with the desire to implement it. From cataloguing to communicating, both 1D and 2D codes hold near infinite possibilities, limited only by the creativity of the user.
Whether using helpful software like Booxter, or making your own codes with a tool like The BarCode News' Free Barcode Generator, I encourage you to explore how barcodes can impact your quality of life.
Booxter is available for download for $29.99 at http://www.deepprose.com/ where you can also purchase bluetooth and USB barcode scanners.
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