Smartphone Barcode Reader

JordanBernhardt
My research usually brings me to a variety of different sources that I find online and that are passed on to me in hard copy form. For hard copy sources, I'll have to find a citation online or enter them manually. I would love Zotero smartphone app similar to the barcode apps found on any modern smartphone that automatically takes citation information via barcode and syncs it with your zotero account.

Journals and such would have to adopt the barcode system on a broad scale for it to be truly effective, but imagine being able to record citation info for any magazine article you read or book you take out of the library... while its in your hand. Sources you see on the go could be easily kept track of. I think it would be really useful.

Having the academic community adopt a barcode standard would be difficult and may not happen, but perhaps it would, and I think it would be cool if Zotero started it.
  • ajlyon
    This would be rather easy to do with the desktop version of Zotero, at least for books. ISBNs can be entered into the magic wand already.

    Once the API gets write access, and the website allows the entry of new items (perhaps even including ISBN lookup?), this will indeed be pretty easy to add to an existing bar code reader library/app.
  • adamsmith
    and for journal articles that'd be DOIs, no? I'd guess that it's probably easier to teach a smartphone to read plain numbers than to get journal publishers to include barcodes.
  • MagicFab
    edited June 18, 2012
    On Android this is now possible with the Zandy and Scanner for Zotero apps, although I believe both only support ISBN only when scanning.
  • DWL-SDCA
    I have had some success with BibUp an iPhone app from University of Fribourg.

    BibUp allows you to create bibliographic references by scanning books barcodes and extracts of text. The references, including the OCRed text, can be viewed on a web page and collected using the Zotero plugin for Firefox.

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