Catalog Sorting

AlanMintaka · Post by **AlanMintaka** » January 14th, 2015, 11:45 pm

Hello,

I noticed that when I browsed the catalog by "Genre/Subject" and then "Fantastic Fiction - Science Fiction", there was no way to sort by Author. The default sorting was "Alphabetical" by title. The only other option was "Release Date."

It would be helpful if there was a sort by Author option when browsing the "Genre/Subject" category of the catalog. Some of us don't know all of the authors in the Science Fiction genre that you've catalogued, so browsing the entire catalog by "Author" won't tell us directly which author(s) have written Science Fiction titles. The advanced search engine would be similarly limiting because we don't know which authors to search. Sorting by "Genre/Subject" and then "Author" would solve this problem.

Also, there is a great deal of white space regardless of the sorting option(s) chosen. This requires a lot of time to search the catalog listing because there is no way to change the number of entries shown on a catalog page. This could be easily solved by providing an option to revert to the old text-only catalog format, which was much more efficiently presented.

Thanks for your time,

Post by **TriciaG** » January 15th, 2015, 6:32 am

Thank you for the suggestion! I agree that better sorting and browsing is definitely needed. We wanted it, but the funds ran out.

I will make sure it's on the list for our next site update - but we don't know when that will be.

ekzemplaro · Post by **ekzemplaro** » January 16th, 2015, 5:10 am

Hello Alan san,

AlanMintaka wrote: Sorting by "Genre/Subject" and then "Author" would solve this problem.

Following this suggestion, I added author sort function to my LibriVox catalog.

If you have a time, please pay a visit.
http://ekzemplaro.org/librivox/catalog/

Your feedback are very welcome.

Cheers,
Masa

AlanMintaka · Post by **AlanMintaka** » January 16th, 2015, 2:02 pm

ekzemplaro wrote:Hello Alan san,
If you have a time, please pay a visit.
http://ekzemplaro.org/librivox/catalog/
Your feedback are very welcome.
Cheers,
Masa

Hello Masa,

Thank you, it works very well! This is exactly what I've been looking for, and helps me find public domain titles by Science Fiction authors I may not know about.

Do you maintain this catalog on a volunteer basis, or are you beta-testing catalog APIs for Librivox?

I noticed your salutation, "Alan san", and explored your home page at http://ekzemplaro.org as best I could (with Google Translate!!!). I am a HUGE anime and manga fan and so recognized the honorific.

Please excuse my ignorance on this point: should I say "Masa san" or "Masa chan"?

kayray · Post by **kayray** » January 16th, 2015, 4:47 pm

Hi Masa san,

Is it possible to make your catalog search by forum name? I can't find that "kayray" has read anything :)

ekzemplaro · Post by **ekzemplaro** » January 17th, 2015, 1:21 am

Hello Alan san,

AlanMintaka wrote:it works very well!

Thank you. This kind of infomation is important for a developper like PL.

AlanMintaka wrote:Do you maintain this catalog on a volunteer basis, or are you beta-testing catalog APIs for Librivox?

A volunteer basis.

AlanMintaka wrote:should I say "Masa san" or "Masa chan"?

Please use 'san'. 'chan' sounds like childish.

Hello Kara san,

kayray wrote:Is it possible to make your catalog search by forum name? I can't find that "kayray" has read anything

How about this page.
http://ekzemplaro.org/librivox/statistics_classic/
Click 'Readers' and then click 'kayray'.
The information is a bit old. But you see 265 titles.

Cheers,
Masa

AlanMintaka · Post by **AlanMintaka** » January 17th, 2015, 10:10 am

ekzemplaro wrote:Hello Alan san,
...
AlanMintaka wrote:should I say "Masa san" or "Masa chan"?
Please use 'san'. 'chan' sounds like childish.
...
Cheers,
Masa

Masa san,

Sorry, I thought "san" and "chan" were gender references, as in the English "mister" and "miss".

This idea is of course based on subtitle translations I see when viewing anime (I always listen to Japanese audio with English subtitles; I hate English dubbing).

"san" it is then!

I now use your index exclusively when searching for Librivox titles. I have already found several genre-specific titles by my favorite narrator, Mark Nelson, that would have required much longer searches with Lbirivox's own index.

You have the right idea about designing such indexes: function is more important than form.

What database and authoring software do you use?

ekzemplaro · Post by **ekzemplaro** » January 19th, 2015, 4:07 am

Hello Alan san,

AlanMintaka wrote:What database and authoring software do you use?

The database is just a JSON file. During development I use CouchDB.
I don't use authoring software. I use an editor, which is called 'vi'.
I use jQuery Library.

Cheers,
Masa

gypsygirl · Post by **gypsygirl** » January 19th, 2015, 5:38 am

kayray wrote:Hi Masa san,

Is it possible to make your catalog search by forum name? I can't find that "kayray" has read anything

The way the new search works, if you search a reader (either by forum name or catalog name) in the simple search, it'll bring up a link to their reader page. You click on that and then you see the results. If you use the advanced search, it takes you directly to a list of results.

Scapaflow · Post by **Scapaflow** » February 16th, 2015, 10:04 am

Hello.
When looking for "non-fiction" items in Dutch, for example, most of the time is spent scrolling through the various individual parts of collections that have one Dutch recording among many tens of individual items.
Is there a way to recatalogue, so that only the actual Dutch parts are catalogued as Dutch?
Thanks.

February 16th, 2015, 2:42 pm

There are some bugs or idiosyncracies that occur when using the advanced search that we weren't able to get resolved before the current catalog was released. This is one of these. It's on the list for the next round of revisions, once our sysadmin has time to set up a new dev environment so we can test programming changes before implementing them. Please bear with us.

Scapaflow · Post by **Scapaflow** » February 16th, 2015, 3:18 pm

OK . Thanks.

ekzemplaro · Post by **ekzemplaro** » February 17th, 2015, 3:37 am

Hello Scapaflow san,

How about this solution.

1) Visit the following page
http://ekzemplaro.org/librivox/catalog/
9068 titles appear.

2) Select Dutch
174 titles appear.

3) Select completed
166 titles appear

4) Selet *non-fiction
12 titles appear

I see several books by Charles Dickens.
There are 35 titles in Dutch by Charles.
34 by Charles Dickens and 1 by Charles Darwin.

Cheers,
Masa