bar-code scanning for catalog shooting

[Telesca Photography <telephotonc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings!

I was wondering if anyone out there is doing the kind of volume shooting 
where they might need or have used a bar-code scanner to input data 
directly into the EXIF data?  Or even used a scanner hooked up to a 
laptop/computer tethered to a camera so that the bar code data could be 
entered while the shot was relatively fresh in the system?

By "fresh in the system", I mean the set-up was directly in front of the 
photographer, the image was on the laptop/computer, and the box or tag 
with the barcode was with the photographer - as opposed to having it 
done at a later time and having to look up the image in a library.

Bar codes are scanned as soon as the products come into the warehouse - 
to see if they go to one on-line catalog or the other. If the product 
info pops up on the screen, it means the product can go onto the website 
inventory right away.  If not - it means it's gotta be shot - unless 
we've already done it previously and have no way to look it all up.

One source - Foologray in Germany - has a wireless scanner which 
transmits directly to the camera via a bluetooth dongle - 
http://www.foolography.com/barcodes/.  But I've heard of other scanners 
used to scan into the image file in Lightroom.  The problem is - the 
software used to load the images we shoot into the web catalogs doesn't 
allow for searching by bar-code data that's contained in the EXIF data.  
I recommend that they have a read-only folder of all our images that can 
be searched by this barcode data - but that hasn't been set up yet, and 
not sure that it will be.

Just thought I'd put this out there and see if anyone is has used bar 
code scanners to keep track of this data.

Chris Telesca