CueCat

The box in the mail yesterday, and today, an email from LibraryThing.com, finally pushed me to make a decision.  I bought a CueCat.

I went crazy and bought about 10 books that were on sale by 60% or more before I left for Innovations, and yesterday the first box arrived.  I have been looking for a book/inventory database and some way to manage it for some time and came across an open source program called DataCrow for managing library type items.  Even though I installed the program, though, it’s a bit daunting to try to enter all of my books, CD’s, and DVD’s so I’ve put it off.

The obvious solution is to get a barcode scanner.  Could I get by without it for entering my books…well, sure.  But my DH has quite the CD collection, too, and that’s not any project I want to take on by hand!  And we really need a list of those titles for insurance purposes.

With the arrival of the box yesterday, I figured it would be a good time to enter the info before they went on my shelf.  The problem then becomes which scanner to buy, and they aren’t cheap.  I don’t need a really heavy duty one, and besides, I don’t even really know what I need.  For $15, I ordered the CueCat.  I have other plans for helping to track my inventory, too, so this will be mighty handy if I can get it working properly.

I’ve seen this device before but there’s a history to the device.  You can read all about it on Wikipedia, but essentially, it was initially developed with a customer tracking technology installed and privacy concerns emerged.  The company website and its services are now defunct, and there are lots of sites around to “declaw” the Cat to remove any doubt about sending out personal information.  So, once it arrives, I’ll declaw the cat and get organized!