Gurulib.com is a free service that lets you build a list of the items in your personal library by scanning in the barcodes of your books, CDs, etc. You can review them, sort them, and track who’s borrowed them. You can also ask Gurulib to inform you when a book has dropped to a price you want to pay. It uses genres rather than tags; tags would be a nice addition.

LibraryThing.com, which is free for the first 200 books, seems to be more advanced in its features and has a bigger community using it. It doesn’t let you scan in barcodes, but it’s quite slick in its ability to find the title you meant to type. Liz Lawley’s PULP is an enterprise server that lets you do the scanning thing: point your camera phone at a barcode and the item gets added to your library. Liz has some big plans for future PULP developments. (I went to her excellent session at Foo Camp.) There are others. This genre of service is getting popular.

GuruLib has a demo library you can play with. [Tags: gurulib libraries librarything liz_lawley tags]

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