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

tis · Post by **tis** » July 5th, 2007, 11:37 pm

tis wrote:
12makoto wrote:There was something that I noticed on the catalog page. The number next to the languages in the select box don't always match the results found.

Sean
Added to the bug tracker

OK, the numbers of the pull-down included works which had been started and abandoned. Now fixed.

Shurtagal · Post by **Shurtagal** » July 8th, 2007, 1:49 pm

FYI: the "new releases" link on the right hand side of the main site is broken.

kri · Post by **kri** » July 9th, 2007, 11:52 am

Shurtagal wrote:FYI: the "new releases" link on the right hand side of the main site is broken.

It works for me. What feed reader are you using??

Shurtagal · Post by **Shurtagal** » July 9th, 2007, 12:31 pm

K its working now sorry.

kri · Post by **kri** » July 9th, 2007, 12:41 pm

Shurtagal wrote:K its working now sorry.

It is my theory that this is a Wordpress bug in the newest version. It's happening with other WP blogs I've seen. I'll keep an eye on fixes.

Gen · Post by **Gen** » April 15th, 2008, 10:34 am

I would love to have a way to search by subject. For example, such a feature would allow a user to browse books on topics of personal interest like books about "France" or "Spring". It would be a great way to explore the resources available at LibriVox and possibly find new favorite books or authors. Does anyone know if such a search function would be possible?

CalmDragon · Post by **CalmDragon** » May 31st, 2008, 7:16 am

I know we are not there yet, but sub-categories would be a nice addition.
For instance, fiction in english produces over 800 results, but if I wanted only science fiction in english, it gets harder. I didn't realize how hard until I saw the keyword list at archive.org for librivox and noticed these:

Sci Fi (1)
Sci-fi (18)
SciFi (1)
Science (12)
Science Fiction (26)
Science-fiction (1)

I'm having a terrible time hording all of the ancient sci-fi when these works are keyworded as so many different ways. Help.
resource link

Cori · Post by **Cori** » May 31st, 2008, 8:20 am

Here you go, Calmdragon ...

http://librivox.org/newcatalog/search_advanced.php?genre=Science+Fiction&status=complete&language=English&action=Search

CalmDragon · Post by **CalmDragon** » May 31st, 2008, 2:06 pm

Thank you! and a question:
In the genre box, did you type science+fiction or science fiction or science,fiction?

Cori · Post by **Cori** » May 31st, 2008, 2:27 pm

science fiction -- nothing else would work. The genres are named simply, so there aren't all the alternative spellings to worry about. Of course, it's a pain to find which genre one wants, and you couldn't search by combined genres (so all the science fiction for children, for example) but ... that's why we are always thinking about new cataloguing refinements.

CalmDragon · Post by **CalmDragon** » May 31st, 2008, 5:28 pm

Thank you again, the 'search by genre link' is what I needed to learn about for the future too.

dononeworld · Post by **dononeworld** » February 8th, 2009, 8:46 am

I would like to see a public rating system. Anyone asked about this before?

Also, I think sub-category searching would be nice.

RuthieG · Post by **RuthieG** » February 8th, 2009, 9:12 am

dononeworld wrote:I would like to see a public rating system. Anyone asked about this before?

Yes, just once or twice.

Here's one of the many threads on this subject: http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16045

I would also point out that every catalogue page has a link to the Internet Archive page for that project, where reviews and ratings can be left.

dononeworld wrote:Also, I think sub-category searching would be nice.

Clicking 'More Search Options' on the Catalog Search takes you to an Advanced Search, where you can search by category, genre, language, reader, solo/group etc. Is this what you had in mind?

Ruth

cefn · Post by **cefn** » February 14th, 2009, 11:41 am

In the tradition of scratching your own itch, I created this easy-to-navigate catalog of Librivox recordings for an elderly relative of mine...

http://cefn.com/librivox/

...since I couldn't browse the existing Librivox catalog at all well myself, let alone ask my granny to.

It provides direct links to the streaming audio as the first link against each title, so I hope even screenreaders can use it to get straight to the content.

If there's additional views or slices of data which would be useful then let me know and I'll try to build the extra pages you want.

I hope to iron out some of the data weirdness (non-breaking-space characters showing up as &xA;) over the coming weeks, but it's already usable.

Hopefully this link will be suitable to send to non-technical people who aren't insiders in the project. The following comments in this thread may be addressed by the new approach.

Chrisczech wrote:My third point is about usability. A friend who is fairly computer-literate was invited to look at the catalogue to see the "bill-of-fare" on offer at Librivox, but he found it quite confusing in that he felt he was expected to know what he was looking for before he began, rather than being able to browse the titles easily. He very soon asked for help in using the catalogue. Had he been alone he would have given up.
The problem may be in that the links are small in size and not sufficiently clear to aid usability.

kayray wrote:And a giant ascii page of everything will look MOST impressive :)

Chrisczech wrote:Further to the above:
Are all books given a genre? I searched all the listed genres and could not find a book which I read. Has it a different, unlisted, genre - or none?

kri wrote:A browse feature is in the works. I can't give you a time period, but it'll be for title and author.

ExEmGe wrote: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

The existing catalog is a really difficult catch22 for new visitors. There's no list of which authors or titles there are, only a 'search' interface which requires you to already know what you're looking for, which by definition you don't.

The search plurges a small slice of metadata (only a few records at a time) onto the screen in response to your query, requires you to click on 'next page' and choose specific letters when you don't even know what authors and titles there are because you can't browse them in the first place!

Deep in this thread I found this page mentioned...
http://librivox.org/newcatalog/text_catalog.php
...which is really useful, but not linked directly from the frontpage. Perhaps it should be. It took me this long to find it.

Also given that there is good data cleansing going on, why not use the archive.org metadata to store it directly, so it can be used by other projects (like mine) to generate indexes for librivox?

Currently I don't think I have any access to the cleansed data. The archive.org metadata which I can access doesn't have the up to date extras like readers and genres.

By the way if anyone is interested I'm very happy to share the full source of the system I'm using to develop the browsable index.

Illiterati · Post by **Illiterati** » February 14th, 2009, 1:10 pm

I'm not exactly an insider, so I'm not aware of the conversation going on in the more restricted forums, but I see the manifold benefits of your approach. Some suggestions, that are not even half-thought yet, and I really think you should wait for discussion/feedback from more experienced people, and I also think some of the stuff I propose would be impossible to parse out of the current informaton:

1. Browse by author is great. Equally great would be if among the writers there were translators for instance like this;

.
.
Conrad, Joseph
Conscience, Hendrik
Constantin, Ernst
Constance, Garnett (as translator)
Conway, Agnes Ethel Conway and Sir Martin
.
.

2.1 I personally would like to see the author also on the browse by Book title page - for two reasons. Sometimes I do not know who the writer is, but would like to know while browsing and at some point there might be indentical titles; so something like

.
.
A Master of Mysteries by The Unknown
A Match by Another Unknown
A Midsummer Night's Dream by Will Shakespeare
.
.

2.2 The Browse by book title-page would be perfect for additional filters. I would like to see something like genre-selection, dramatic/narrative readings, solo/group, language choices to filter this very page.

If it would be possible to flip the page to show all book titles arranged also by author and not just by book title, I could then also filter those results - the benefit being that I could very easily spot all the Jack London books available in German. To clarify, I mean a list like this:

.
.
Aurelius, Marcus
Meditations

Austen, Jane
Emma
Emma
Lady Susan
Lady Susan
Love and Freindship
Mansfield Park
Northanger Abbey
Northanger Abbey
Persuasion
Persuasion
Persuasion
Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice (Group Project)
Pride and Prejudice (Solo Project)
Sense and Sensibility
Sense and Sensibility
Sense and Sensibility - (Version 02)
The Watsons
.
.

Which I then could filter with solo/group, language, genre, or with any other information we come up with and care to put in the database.

3. The page of an individual author just cries for a picture of the guy + some additional info. I am also a bit torn about the current way of presenting the results once I search Edgar Allan Poe, for instance. What we now get is a huge list of individual poems from collections (which I am glad we have, of course, and in multiple versions at that), and then among them couple of collections and longer works.

This obviously needs to be restructured; collections and large works first in chronological order (a choice between that and alphabetical would be great) and then other types clearly structured - as in poems, short non-fiction etc.

I'm sorry if I am reiterating trivialities.