Project Details

Introduction

Google on the UPC code of just about any of your recent purchases and chances are you’ll get a hit. There are many web sites and services, for example Amazon and their Amazon Web Services, that allow you to either directly look up product information on their web site or indirectly look it up via third party software by searching on its UPC code or other uniquely identifying bar code.

In fact there many software programs that use Amazon’s capability to let you easily catalog and manage your various collections such as: books, movies, music, video games, electronics, software, toys and tools. Two such products are Delicious Library 2 by Delicious Monster and IntelliScanner’s line of asset management software.

Starting around 1970, comic books began carrying UPC codes and today the majority of comic books have UPC codes. Imagine being able to enter or scan your comic book’s UPC code into your favorite comic book cataloging program and have all of its information automatically added to your collection? Unfortunately, no such resource that provides this capability exists.

Enter the Comic Book UPC Database. The Comic Book UPC Database is a free and community contributed database where you can search on a comic book’s UPC code and get title and issue information.

The first goal of the Comic Book UPC Database is to build a community of users who work together to enter comic book UPC codes, title and issue information. The second goal of the Comic Book UPC Database is to provide a programmatic interface to comic book cataloging software. Enter or scan a comic book UPC code into the cataloging software, it looks the UPC code up in the Comic Book UPC Database and retrieves all the title and issue information for that comic book.

Additionally users will be able to manually look up UPC codes or upload UPC codes in batch and download title and issue information formatted for import into existing cataloging software.

Benefits

Community driven – users enter the UPC code, title and issues information
Self correcting – because the database is community driven users will continually review and correcting title and issue data.
Open – the web site and data are free to use.
Provides a UPC lookup web service – third party comic book cataloging software uses the web service to programmatically lookup UPC codes, retrieve comic book information and update the end user’s comic book collection.
Standardization – through community input and feed back the Comic Book UPC Database will be able to standardize the type and format of the data collected for titles and issues.
Consistency – by having one source of title and issue information, the data used by all comic book collectors, cataloging software, etc. will be the same.