[Alexandria-list] Just another wishlist for Alexandria

[Cathal Mc Ginley]

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On Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:58:28 -0300
Pablo Bianchi <pablo.bianchi at gmail.com> wrote:

> hi!
> 
> I have been using Alexandria for a while and made a little wishlist.
> 
> --
> Pablo

Hi Pablo, thanks for getting involved. I generally love "features
wishlists"; they provide good ideas for possible future development.

What version of Alexandria are you currently using? Because some of the
features you mention are already supported... 0.6.4.1 is the latest
release. 

I'll go through your list a few at a time, with comments.

> 
> WISHLIST:
> 
> Same functionalities of Amarok to mp3, to books on Alexandria:
>    Toggle checkboxs directly on list
>    "Edit tag 'Authors'..." (for example) on context menu when
> righ-clicing a book on the list
Mentioned in Feature Request #23740,
http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?func=detail&aid=23740&group_id=205&atid=866
along with how I might implement that.

>    Next and Previews buttons on Properties box, to move...
I don't really know the Amarok GUI (I mostly use GNOME) but I can
imagine what this would look like. Sounds like a nice idea actually;
view the complete properties of a book in the 'properties' dialog, and
then to get to the next book, just click the Next button (rather than
closing the dialog and clicking the next book). 

Not sure how well this would fit in with the current GUI, but it's
worth considering.

One of the things users apparently love about Alexandria is that the
GUI is pleasant to use, so that's one 'feature' I want to keep above
all others.

>    Statistics and Labels tabs and functionalities
You'll have to expand upon this, I don't know what you mean... What
statistics should be displayed, and in what form? I don't understand
what you mean by 'Labels' in this context either, unless you're talking
about 'tags'.

Can you describe what the feature would look like? A pencil-sketch
would work too - or a screenshot of the Amarok feature you're referring
to...

> Export/Import to ISO 2709 Format using MARC 21 bibliographic format,
Now this *could* be done, since the Z39.50 support does use MARC.
Unfortunately, I only barely understand the MARC format - it's a part
of the code I've barely touched. 

Would you really have MARC files lying around to use for Import and
Export? Usually, we just let Ruby-ZOOM deal with accessing Z39.50
sources and parsing the MARC documents.

If importing and exporting to MARC files is useful, it could be added
quite easily I'm sure.

> Using UTF-8, Latin1, or any other coding.
In the future, Alexandria will use UTF-8 everywhere (where possible).
At the moment, it's a bit of a mish-mash, and there are occasional
encoding problems.

> Import also the Synopsis of the book, is the field 520 of MARC 21.
Thanks! That's something I can add to the "optional book properties" in
a future version.

> Import from a TXT with a set of ISBNs
This feature is already supported: select menu item "Library > Import"
and select "ISBN List (*.txt)"

> Import using z39.50 when Amazon, WorldCat... doesn't works (like ILSs
> like Koha) 
This feature is also supported, but you may not have Ruby-ZOOM
installed which provides this support. The simple way to install it is:

1) Install rubygems using whatever tools your platform prefers (for
example, on Debian or Ubuntu # apt-get install rubygems)
2) # gem install marc
3) # gem install zoom

Restart Alexandria, and you should be able to add new Z39.50 providers.

> Why if I enter to the link web I can see the cover, but it
> doesn't download it when fetching data?
Can you give a specific ISBN of a book for which this happens and the
provider where you can see the cover image? It may be that the book was
found at a different provider from the one whose link you followed. 

For example, I can't grab images from WorldCat (the web page uses
complex JavaScript to display the cover image) but I can from
Amazon and AdLibris etc. So if your book was found at WorldCat first, it
won't have found any image.

Naturally, once it has found a book, Alexandria stops searching - and
it can't know that it hasn't found the 'best' data available. 

One feature that would be nice would be to 'fill-in extra data' from a
specific provider afterwards.

> Clic on cover image (on Properties box) should let:
>    Save the image
That's a nice idea, it would be very convenient. Of course, it *is*
currently possible to view all cover images directly by browsing
"~/.alexandria/My Library" with Nautilus or another file browser.

>    Set url or path of the image (not only path, locally)
That's a nice idea too: it should be quite easy to implement directly
(but designing a  simple GUI for this would a bit more complex).

Ideally, for GNOME, the best way would be to use GIO/GVFS... but I
don't think that's completely stable at the moment, nor is http support
done yet.

>    If it doesn't found it on Amazon and those: Offer a set of covers
> using Google Images
I think that searching a book-specific site like LibraryThing might be
more helpful here. That *is* a feature I plan to add, eventually.

I would generally be *very* reluctant to display the results of a
Google image search in Alexandria (even with safe-search on :^)

(This is why I think in future Alexandria should support plugins; so
individual users can add a feature like this that *they* might like but
which others would prefer to stay out of the main body of the
software.)

> Possibility to create different notes:
>    Unknown words (It would be awesome that it search automatically the
> meaning/translation, detecting automatically (or not) the language,
> for eg using WorldReference.com).
You probably meant WordReference.com

I think this is too broad a feature for a cataloguing program. I
personally can't see it being useful for cataloguing your books.

But then, I'm an English-speaker and most of my books are in English;
if you could give me a Use-Case that describes how you might use this
feature and why it fits in to Alexandria's overall purpose (keeping
track of your books) then it might help me understand your wish for the
feature.

>    Things to search about
>    Remarkable quotes.
This would be a nice idea, but where would Alexandria get these from?  I
don't know of any online book quotes database. There may be copyright
issues which prevent such sites from existing.

>    Related URLs, Books, Movies
Again, how would we generate a list of related items? There aren't
really any sources that spring to mind that Alexandria could search
automatically. (Amazon gives 'related purchases' which is not useful in
the same way at all.)

> Link to biography of the author on Wikipedia (look for Context sidebar
> on Amarok for inspiration) using embedded browser
Link to author biography would be a nice touch; but probably just
launching a browser rather than having an embedded browser. I do want
to keep the user-interface as simple as possible.

As for how we'd get the URL of the author biography... that's another
story. We could just construct the URL and hope the page exists, or
we could search Wikipedia. But it's not trivial to get the canonical
name of the author (never mind dealing with pen-names), and not every
author will have their own page of course. GoodReads.com also has Author
Biography pages, so that might be a useful start.

> Different color for odd lines on List view
This is already present. If it's not visible on your system, it's
something to do with your GTK+ theme; but Alexandria definitely sets
the "rendering hint" to alternate colours in the List View.
http://alexandria.rubyforge.org/screenshots.html

> Checkbook on "Add book..." to not to close the dialog box, to quickly
> add another book (with ISBN or anything else).
There is already such a checkbox on the "Add Book..." dialog in
Alexandria 0.6.4, but not on the "Add Book Manually..." dialog. 

Making sure this type of feature is consistent is tricky. The dialog
for "Add Book" is not too overcrowded, so adding the checkbox was easy
to do while keeping the GUI simple. But the "Add Book Manually..."
dialog is essentially the same as the "Book Properties" dialog; where
would we put the checkbox?  Would it be easy to see and understand what
it's for? Would it make an already-crowded dialog too complex?

Other users have pointed out that the user-interface for adding books
could be improved and simplified. In particular, there are now two
dialogs for adding books from a barcode scanner; one adds books in the
foreground, one does it in the background... It's not so easy to figure
out which is best, or how to combine the two dialogs without losing any
features that users like.

>

Well, that went on for longer than I thought it would. I'll try to work
some of your wishlist items (as well as lots of earlier input from the
mailing list, Feature Requests on the Tracker and data from the
recently-departed Wiki) into a requirements document sometime (soon,
hopefully). Also, some of your questions could probably go into an
online FAQ :^)  

I outlined my plans for future work on Alexandria on the list recently:
http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/alexandria-list/2009-February/001598.html
In particular, I want to get some other people looking at the code I've
started for Palatina; I hope to set up a corner of the web for that
project soon, including a list of goals and a requirements document.
So, watch this space...

Cheers,

   -   Cathal.
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