Every spare minute lately has been devoted to what passes for activity indoors--cleaning, in other words. I thought I had disposed of all three, or even four, CueCat items. I had received one from Wired, one from Forbes, maybe one from PC Magazine, and I forget where else. I'm sorry I disposed of any, because when I found the one I looked at the info with it and realized it's just a bar-code scanner--the software was probably just to send info a la DoubleClick and its brethren. I think I can remember reading about using it to scan ISBNs to help build a database or catalogue of books. In fact, the CueCat is a bit baulky as a scanner, but no more so than any other (for instance, the system used by the Austin Public Library). When I get a minute, I'm going to look at stupid Access or even see whether there's a freeware or shareware probram out there. The trouble is, most of our books date from well before the general use of ISBNs, with plenty being products of the nineteenth century. It's well past time to get out that ladder and antistatic cloth and dust off the old double-shelved books anyhow.