Dewey Decimal in the home

I know I just said I'd be talking about neat iPad apps I've found, but I realized that I'd discovered a regular old computer application a few days ago that I think is well worth sharing.

The discovery came amidst my spring cleaning when I wondered whether there was a convenient way to electronically keep track of all of my books.  In my mind's eye, I wanted what most public libraries have: a system that allows you to search for books, provides their location, and where you could note that the book was "out" or that you'd lent it to a friend, etc.  Preferably, my hypothetical home library system would be accessible to, at least, everyone else in the house.

Assuming that I would not find such a useful program for free, I queried my programmer friend (hi, Danny) about the difficulty of building such a thing myself given that I'm not awful with computers and have some very basic understanding of programming theory.  I figured that what I wanted was essentially just a searchable database that could be accessed through an online interface.

After talking to him for awhile about it, I determined that I might eventually be capable of such a thing, but that it would take a significant amount of time.  As such, and not really expecting to find what I wanted, I did a quick Google search to see if I could find something close.

And I was ever so pleasantly surprised to find Book Hunter.

Book Hunter has everything I was looking for and more and it's free to boot!  Here are a few things I rather like about it:

-The interface is simple and easy to navigate.
-Adding books to your electronic library is a cinch.  You can, of course, enter all of the book's information manually but it also has the option of looking them up for you.  You can enter the title and perhaps an author name and it'll search Amazon.com for the book and fill in the rest of its information.  OR you can press a little button, it will activate your webcam (if you have one attached) and prompt you to hold the book's ISBN bard code up to the camera.  The program will recognize and read the barcode automatically and look the book up.  I think this is very cool and it definitely streamlines the process of logging all of your books.
-When you add a book, you can specify whether it belongs to a collection, its location (e.g., upstairs hall-second bookcase- third shelf), whether you've loaned it to someone, who you loaned it to three months ago, whether you've read it yet or not, etc.
-It's not just for books.  You can use it to keep track of all of your DVDs, magazines, CDs, comic books, etc.

The form for adding a new book.

So, overall, I think this is pretty neat.  My longterm goal for Book Hunter is to register my family's entire book collection (no small feat; we have so many books...) which will likely be a significant time commitment, but ultimately worth it, I think.  Too often I know we have a book that I want to read and I eventually give up because I simply can't find it.  With some luck, Book Hunter will bring a bit more needed organization to my possessions and life.

On a fun, related note, let's say you wanted to go old school with your home library. Well, ThinkGeek offers a really neat kit for running your library the classic way :)