The New Catalog is Official! (Feature Requests & Bugs)

Comments about LibriVox? Suggestions to improve things? News?
LibraryLady
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Post by LibraryLady »

Yes, the genre thing definitely needs sorting out and Betsie (thistlechick) and I, who are both catalog librarians in real life, have plans to work on this when the time is right. Please bear with us and be patient. :)
Annie Coleman Rothenberg
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ExEmGe
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Post by ExEmGe »

And I too think it's great and give thanks and acknowledge the hard work.
I would however like to echo Stefan's comment earlier about showing the author's name in the 'found' list. I'd like to send a list of what we have to an elderly relative. She wouldn't have the faintest idea of whether she wanted me to send her a copy of a book if the author's name wasn't shown on the list
Regards
Andy Minter
hugh
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Post by hugh »

Author name is in the bug reports.

I don't know how that slipped through!
Mark Turner
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Post by Mark Turner »

How about a search selection for "novel" or "short"?
kri
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Post by kri »

Mark Turner wrote:How about a search selection for "novel" or "short"?
You can find short stories through the Genre classification "Short Stories".
Mark Turner
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Post by Mark Turner »

I'm mostly interested in long works. I rarely listen to short stories so I'd like to be able to list only novels.
12makoto
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Post by 12makoto »

kri wrote:
12makoto wrote:One small suggestion would be to put a "Best viewed with: (good browser list here)" section on there and maybe some links to their homesites.

Just because in IE, the typing suggestions for the reader input shows up behind the other form fields in IE. So, you might want to put browser suggestions on the page with the browsers that you've tested it on thus far. Also, for future versions we could try to do some investigations to see if there are some style attributes that might get IE to display it properly.

Sean


Ohhh, as a (admittedly amateur) web designer that makes me cringe. I'd rather fix it than put "Best viewed in..." because those notices really are useless. It's like saying...sorry, this layout sucks in your browser.

Oh, and please put your further requests and reports in the following thread instead of here, so they're all in one place: http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4995
Whoops, sorry about that. I thought that was this thread since it was on top. I have some of the same feelings about the disclaimer, but... I figured it was something you could put up quickly while an IE fix is being worked on to give you some more time.
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thistlechick
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Post by thistlechick »

Mark Turner wrote:I'm mostly interested in long works. I rarely listen to short stories so I'd like to be able to list only novels.
That's a good idea Mark! ... I've often wanted to be able to search Project Gutenberg by file size (so that I could record short works)... Perhaps at some point we will be able to allow users to search by total book length (though, the results might end up including collections of short works, so that might not work so well either)... hmmm ...
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Post by hugh »

hmm... we brought this up before, but thistle, that's a great way to do it. a search by total file size. good thinking. will wait till dust settles, and then add that to the wish-list.
12makoto
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Post by 12makoto »

Kri, has any thought been put into cataloging menu pages? I know it's probably not really a big deal with the menu pages that are already up for Aesop's fables and the History of England since they should all list in a row and alphabetically in the new system, but I was wonder for works such as the Bible and others, where they are released in parts as short works and kind of scattered all over the place and out of order. It's nothing dire, but something to consider if it could easily be implemented in the setup we have right now.

Sean
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kri
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Post by kri »

12makoto wrote:Kri, has any thought been put into cataloging menu pages? I know it's probably not really a big deal with the menu pages that are already up for Aesop's fables and the History of England since they should all list in a row and alphabetically in the new system, but I was wonder for works such as the Bible and others, where they are released in parts as short works and kind of scattered all over the place and out of order. It's nothing dire, but something to consider if it could easily be implemented in the setup we have right now.

Sean
I don't think the menu pages are necessary with the search function. The menu pages that were (manually) created before will stay as they are, but they won't be updated, nor will new ones be created. You can create your own menu page of sorts, by typing "Aesop's Fables" into the title, or any other similar thing you're looking for. Then bookmark the search results if you want to return to it.

The menu pages were created really because we had no search function, and it put them all in one place easier for users to find.
12makoto
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Post by 12makoto »

I was just trying to think from a user perspective since I was going through threads in the forum and remembered that we had quite a few on-lookers request the entire Bible, and thinking like they would, they would be apt to type in "Bible" from the search string which would only give them a couple results with a few sparse verses and no books; then they would be led to believe that we don't have anything and might give up. But, if they did find away to search (say type in "KJV" which will only bring up 2 out of 3 of those books so far) they aren't going to be in any order with names like "Esther," "Genesis," "Isaiah," "John," "Leviticus," etc. An alphabetical sorting doesn't make much since in this senario. I'm also thinking broader that Jewish, Muslim, Mormon, etc. holy books would have similar problems when someone comes along to attempt those. Also, Starlite's Chronicles of Canada might get lost if someone has to tediously search for the whole set and manually put them in order when they download them.

A second benefit in being able to make a menu page of a collection of works also might prove useful in serial novels such as the Anne series or any of the Edgar Rice Burrough's series and so forth.

But, as far as logical collections like a numbered volume such as what Jim is doing, Aesop's fables, Grimm's fairy tales and so forth. I totally agree with you that menu pages or some sort of page for the collection aren't needed, but there are other times I can think of that it would definitely add to the usability.

Sean
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rootpi
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Post by rootpi »

Like everyone else, I want to primarily say congratulations on the new catalog! It's great!!

For the future wishlist, and it's quite possible that I'm just missing something: it looks like the list of works in other languages is maybe only for entire 'books'? In particular, the [first] multilingual poetry collection has some great foreign pieces, but they don't seem to show up when one searches by language...

But really, again, fantastic system :D
julian
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Post by hugh »

i think the solution is to name our texts better.

"Genesis, KJV" should rather be "Bible: Genesis, KJV" etc. Again, easy to fix. Can one of our professional librarians weigh in here with an opinion on standard format?
CarlManchester
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Post by CarlManchester »

I agree with the idea of having works that come in volumes returned as one result rather than multiply. This would make things look tidier (there doesn't seem to me to be any actual benefit to searching for "Fables" and getting "Aesop's Fables" 8 times or whatever it is), but would also have practical benefits as the catalogue grows.

Hopefully, there will eventually be at least one complete translation fo the Bible, and it will be a lot of work for someone to pick through them and compile them in the correct order, whilst ensuring at the same time they don't pick out one book from the wrong version.

Equally, someone could be looking for books related to the Bible, but specifically not for books of the Bible (eg they might be looking for scriptural commentry or theology). I get what has been said about users being able to perform searches designed to get what they want, but it might be difficult picking through the search results with a large number of books of the Bible and a realatively small number of what the user actually wants. And it may be hard to work out how to do a search that avoids this, particularly if you are not so used to databases.

If things were organised so that you had these tiers, it might arguably have to be done in such a way that a search for "Esther" would still find that individual book, though.
Last edited by CarlManchester on January 9th, 2007, 2:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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