Several things about catalogs, mobile apps, and pictures ….
Just after doing the entry on the photo feature in the Amazon Blackberry app, I was looking at the catalogue at the University of Bath (where I worked for many years) and saw that they were using QR codes.
From a library blog description of the initiative …
I think this is wonderful, it is a really obvious efficiency saving for individuals. So instead of searching the catalogue and writing the info on scraps of paper. I simply find the resource I want, scan the code and save it on my phone. I can then use this to find the item on the shelf. Infact, I can save this on my phone (I’d probably take a little more time and cut and paste into a mobile word document) and start to build up my own reference collection. [QR codes at Bath » Blog Archive » Uni of Bath Library including QR Codes in Catalogue]
Jim Michalko left a comment on the earlier entry about Compare Everywhere, an Android application, for comparison shopping.Says Jim: “In fact the WorldCat API drives an Android App called Compare Everywhere that links a barcode scan to a book in a local library”.
Finally, Kelly Smith noted that she tried out the Amazon Remembers app on the iPhone with book covers and that it worked well. This prompted me to try using the following rather poor image of Paul Muldoon’s The end of the poem.
Amazon matched it correctly to the details for the volume … pretty fancy.
Update: apparently, Amazon Remembers uses human effort to match images to fulfilment opportunities on Amazon. See here for details of how the Mechanical Turk application supports this application.
