One of the advantages of having books that display universally recognised barcodes is that you can sometimes piggyback on top of other people's apps... Some of the library blog wires were buzzing today with news that OCLC's WorldCat library search tool has now been "integrated" into the RedLaser barcode scanning app for iPhone (WorldCat via RedLaser [Worldcat developer blog]). Just scan a barcode, flick through to thee "Look up in a Library" option, and you're there...
Over on the Musings About Librarianship blog, @aarontay describes another barcode reading app - ZBar - that allows you to add in your own URL's as search lookups keyed by the number identified by the barcodee scanning portion of the app. So if a Library catalogue has a nice OpenSearch URI keyed by ISBN (and there's absolutely no good reason for not supporting this sort of access, right?!;-) you can roll your own "scan and library lookup" app to at least prove the concept for your own library.
If, like me, you don't have an iPhone but you do have an Android phone, another interesting book related app is BookMobile. This also allows you to scan a book via its barcode, but the twist with BookMobile is that you can look up details relating to the book on Google Books and add the book to your Google Books library. I'm not sure if the app then allows you to do a full text search across those books within your library, but it should certainly be possible, because a similar approach is used in Wiltshire Heritage Library's full text (Google Books) catalogue search.
LibParlor Online Learning is live(!) & takeaways from launching a big
project
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This post serves two purposes – promotion of a new curriculum that launched
this fall aimed at supporting LIS professionals in developing their
research ...
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