Organizing your collection of CDs, DVDs, video games and books can be a real chore, especially if you lend things out to your friends. With some help from Delicious Monster's Delicious Library, keeping tabs on your collections is a snap.

Delicious Library (DL) takes the tedium out of adding your books, movies, games and music to its database by using your iSight camera or other QuickTime-compatible digital video camera to scan product barcodes. Just hold the barcode up to your camera, and DL does the rest. It checks Amazon's product database for the information it needs and adds it to your library database, complete with cover art.

Delicious Library makes it easy to track your libraries.

If you don't have a camera, you can enter some information about the product, like titles or ISBN codes, and DL will track down the item for you. If your latest library addition isn't in Amazon's database, you can manually enter its information.

Delicious Monster also offers a portable barcode scanner you can use to scan multiple items and then add to Dl all at once. This is handy if you have large libraries that you don't want to carry to your computer.

By default, the items DL manages for you are broken into Books, Movies, Music, and Games categories - or in DL terms, shelves. You can add your own shelves, and then populate them by dragging items from the default shelves into them.

There's a reason categories are called "shelves:" That's exactly how the graphic interface represents them, and viewing your libraries on the virtual shelves makes it easy to keep track of your stuff. When you select an item on a shelf, you can see additional information like publisher or release label, release date, retail price and current value, product descriptions, and more. You can even add your own notes that will appear here, too.

A library database isn't much use if you don't know where the items you lend out are. DL covers that base, too. Since it is Address Book-compatible, you can simply drag a contact onto DL's Borrowers list, and then drag lent items onto their name. Return due dates are automatically set seven days out, but you can change them to suit your needs. Borrowed items get a visible yellow "Out" tag that changes to red when an item is over due.

Overdue items are flagged in red.

The application is also Spotlight aware. I took advantage of that by creating a Smart Folder in the Finder that displays all of my borrowed items. That way I can check to see what's lent out even when DL isn't running.

It also comes with a Dashboard widget you can use to search your library database.

So what's not to like? If you collect comic books, you can't add them to DL's database. There is talk, however, that we may see that feature in a future version. Also, DL uses quite a bit of your Mac's horse power to do its thing. If you have a processor that runs below a gigahertz, or you don't have at least a gigabyte of RAM, you may see some sluggish performance.

The Bottom Line
Delicious Library is an easy to use all-in-one library management application. Thanks to its elegant interface and digital camera support, entering and organizing items is a breeze, plus Spotlight and the included widget give you ways to search your library outside of the application. Older Macs, however, may suffer from some performance issues.