Once upon a time I got a CueCat to catalogue my book collection on a (probably now defunct) Web2.0 service. This was before smartphones and apps, and before I had even a laptop. At the time it felt retro-cool and really did help me speed things up in that task. At the time, I had to box up most of my books and CDs for storage, but I wanted an easy way to know in which box each thing was. I think I even had plans to use it with my CD collection next, but building the backend for turning barcodes back into a reference to a playable directory of ripped files turned out to be too much trouble. Could still be doable if you could query a Jellyfin or Plex database based on UPC codes. Now we all just yell into the void and hope the nearest “AI” hears us.