Delicious Library

Uncategorized

Delicious Library

An interesting piece of software was released yesterday. It’s called Delicious Library, and it’s essentially a program to catalogue your media assets. It will keep track of your CD’s, DVD’s, Books and Video Games. There’s four ways to put an item into the system. You can type in the name and click search, and the program will search amazon.com for matches. Then you just choose the best match and it puts an icon of that item on a bookshelf. You can enter items by searching for isdn numbers or simply typing it all in by hand. However, the really cool trick is to use your iSight to scan in a barcode. I’ve read that it works pretty well. You just hold up a barcode to the iSight, it’ll scan in the barcode and check it against amazon.com. From what I read, it does it in about half a second. If that’s true, it would be pretty simple to scan in a few hundred CD’s, books and DVD’s. The layout of it is pretty slick and the graphics are great. What’s also nice about it is that you can add contacts to is and then ‘check out’ items to various people. So if a friend borrows a book, you can keep track of it. Considering how many books I’ve loaned out over the years and never gotten back, that could come in real handy.

How does this figure into elementary ed? Well, as a former kindergarten teacher, I know that we always had about 70 or 80 books that were extremely difficult to keep track of. We never quite knew what we had. It would have been nice to have our own little electronic card catatlogue just for our room. Would have been rather handy for checking them out to students as well.

However, it’s missing one major function that would definitely justify the $40 price tag. There’s no way to publish your library. You can import from other programs, you can export to a file, but there’s no way to export to HTML. I would love to have my entire library collected together and then posted up to my home page so people could browse through it and see if they want to borrow anything from me. If they add that feature, I’m in. It’s all about putting it out there!