You walk in on a Monday morning, barcode scanner in hand, and spend the next several days going shelf by shelf, book by book, scanning each spine, fixing mismatches, and updating a spreadsheet that somehow still has errors in it by Friday. If you are lucky, you have help. Most of the time, you do not.
There is a better way to do it now. And it does not require any new hardware.
Why traditional library inventory takes so long
The problem is not the size of your collection. It is the method.
Barcode scanners read one book at a time. That means for every book on your shelves, someone has to pick it up, point a scanner at it, wait for the beep, and move on. A 500-book shelf takes hours. A 2,000-book collection can take the better part of a working week — longer if your digital records do not match what is actually on the shelves.
Enterprise library management systems like Follett Destiny or Ex Libris Alma are built for this kind of work, but they come with a price tag and a learning curve that most school libraries and public libraries cannot justify for a one-off cataloguing job.
The result? Many collections go months or years without an accurate inventory. Staff rely on memory, books go missing without anyone noticing, and the catalogue becomes increasingly unreliable.
A library inventory system built around how you actually work
TitleEntry takes a different approach. Instead of scanning books one at a time, you photograph the shelf.
Open TitleEntry on your phone browser — no app download needed. Point your camera at a shelf, take a photo, and the AI reads every visible book spine. Titles, authors, ISBNs, publishers, genres — all pulled automatically. The whole shelf appears as a list in seconds.
You review the results, make any edits inline, and export everything to an Excel spreadsheet with one click. That is the entire process.
What TitleEntry does that most inventory tools do not
Most inventory tools assume you have barcodes. TitleEntry does not need them.
A big part of any real library collection is books that predate ISBNs entirely — anything published before 1970. Heritage shelves, older school collections, and government library stacks are full of them. TitleEntry reads the spine text directly, so those books get catalogued the same way as everything else.
Photograph your shelf
Open TitleEntry on your phone. Take a photo of the shelf. The AI identifies every book it can see, including books without barcodes and books with partial or tilted spines.
Review and edit
Books appear with full metadata. Anything the AI is less confident about gets flagged for your review — you can correct a title, author, or genre directly in the list before saving. Nothing gets saved silently without your approval.
Export to Excel
One click downloads a clean .xlsx file with your full book list. It works with Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, or any spreadsheet tool you already use.
No special hardware. No training sessions. No IT support needed.
Who uses TitleEntry for library inventory
School librarians use it for annual inventory, returning in September to get shelves back in order before term starts. What used to take a week now takes a day or two.
Government and public libraries use it to audit branch collections, process new acquisitions, or build a digital record for shelves that have never been properly catalogued.
University and institutional libraries use it to catalogue departmental reference collections and reading rooms that sit outside the main library system and often have no digital record at all.
What about scanning individual books?
Sometimes you want to add a single book rather than photograph a whole shelf. TitleEntry handles that too.
The barcode scanner mode lets you point your phone at an EAN-13 barcode for an instant ISBN lookup. It is free to use and does not use any scan credits. Good for topping up your catalogue between full inventory sessions.
The honest version of what TitleEntry does and does not do
TitleEntry is a cataloguing and export tool. It is not a full library management system. It does not handle circulation, overdues, patron accounts, or OPAC access.
What it does — it does very well. If your goal is to get a complete, accurate, exportable book list from a physical collection, TitleEntry is the fastest way to do it.
If you already use a library management system and want to import a clean catalogue into it, TitleEntry's Excel export gives you exactly the file you need to do that.
Ready to take inventory of your collection?
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