help us improve the catalog/browse functions

[tis]

Hugh,

Just wondering, are you anticipating some form of pagination in the browse results? It might not be desirable to show all the 'Author starts with A' works at a single glance.

[ExEmGe]

What I would really like would be to be able download a tab delimited file for input to a spreadsheet, like 'Audible' (spit), offer, with an 'author surname' field.

And could the 'browse' function get rid of 'the','a' & 'an' in the sorting when they are the first word so that 'The Warden' comes under 'W'

[hugh]

@tis: well i'm not sure about pagination. check for instance:
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/a

is that more usable or less? i'm not sure.

@andy: i'm not sure what the first part means could you clarify?

but the second part, getting rid of the "the" and "a," the answer should be "yes" ... tho i think we are supposed to sort that out in how we catalog things.

[ExEmGe]

Well - It's just what it says really, a file which contains each line of the database as a tab (or whatever) delimited string so that you can import it into excel or any other spreadsheet and then sort on any combination of fields. It's not linked to the database but I find it easy when I want to find out what's there rather than seeing if a specific work is in the catalogue. It's useful for the latter purpose too though. Sometimes you don't always know how an author is found in the sort. For example (with a modern work) is Norman St. John Stevas to be found under 'St' or 'John or 'Stevas'. It's much easier to scan down a list rather than look under three separate ones.
Look at http:audible.com/catalog to see what I mean.

On the whole, it doesn't matter too much at the moment with only 1000 or so works but when it gets to 10,000 in a year or so...

[Shurtagal]

for browsing - I think Gutenberg does this - for titles starting with "A" "An" "The" etc. it goes to the actual word, "Warden" but leaves an entry at "The Warden" with a link saying "See "Warden, The""

[earthcalling]

When browsing by author, could we have first a list of authors only, then click on the author to see the works? As the catalogue grows, it will be increasingly unwieldy to see all the works against every author beginning with A.

David

[Jc]

David's comments reminds me of a menu I saw on this site:
http://www.deviantart.com/

Look at their menu (Click on Categories, top left)

I don't know how difficult it is to make, though. (Could it be made using Flash?)