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

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

If you search genere with "religion" they all come up. But yeah, thats pretty awkward. :?
"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable
people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress,
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kri
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Post by kri »

Search by language

The search by language will return any project labelled with the language you have chosen. The Multilingual Poetry Collection would be under the language category "Multilingual". This is mainly because the individual works in the project aren't tagged with their language, but the whole project gets tagged with whatever language it belongs to. If this becomes a problem, there may be changes in the future.

Menu Pages

I just think that we need to adjust to a new way of finding the things we need. I know it requires some reworking, but it makes a whole lot more sense for a large catalog of items.

For one, we don't have to make manual indexes, and I don't want to over stress this, but it is important. I'm hoping that you guys can understand that in some cases things may be different in a way you don't like, but it significantly cuts down on the time it took to manually type out the index pages. If you go to any library that has their catalog computerized today, they won't have it structured as we did. It will most likely be a search, with various options. They won't be typing out pages that include all of the works of a particular type or group. It would be a waste of time.

I am very much against going back to the menu pages that we have in the old catalog. I feel it is a waste of time for the MCs that made them. I feel so strongly about automating the catalog as much as possible, that eventually the catalog pages will be made automatically using the new system and our validator. No longer will we have to copy and paste the generated code, alter and fix it to what it needs to be. This may be a long time in coming, but I'm going to push for it as much as I can. I think we would be better suited to spending our time on managing projects, recording our favorite texts, and the fun stuff that is LV. I'm sure many MCs would agree with me.

Carl: Please forgive me while I state the obvious. The search results for Aesop's fables don't come up with multiple results because there was any benefit to it. They were separate projects, and they are separate catalog pages. I don't think I need to restate my strong case against creating menu pages. Also, I don't see why you would rather search for Aesop's fables, receive one result, click on that result, then be brought to a page with 12 links to the 12 volumes and their catalog pages. Why not be presented with the 12 links originally, rather than having to click through one more page?

I will note, that we have plans (long term plans) to have more author information in the future. Ideally one can search for a particular author, get the results for works by that author, as well as a link to the author's page. This would be similar to the individual reader pages (Example here) but would include information about the author's birth/death dates, link to Wikipedia, list of all works done at LV by that author (search for Aesop and get one link to his page), and potentially other things.

Labeling the Bible

Hugh, that's a potential solution. However, this means that whenever we do any other religious text we would have to do the same if we had project with only parts of the text. The other potential solution would be to create a genre "Bible" since one can put multiple genres on a particular project. If we get enough bible works (and we may have now) it may be a good idea.
kristin
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Post by kristin »

kri wrote:I'm sure many MCs would agree with me.
Yup. I always forgot to update the index pages till about three days after I catalogued something so, as an MC, I much prefer the new set up and I'm gleefully looking forward to automatically generated catalogue pages. :D
CarlManchester
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Post by CarlManchester »

Okay, I can accept the idea that the thing should be set up in a way that does not make the admin burden too high.

Could there be a way of sorting things that doesn't do this, though?

For example, could "Books of the Bible" be created as a field, and then a search result for "Bible" bring out a link to the contents of this field without bringing up the contents themselves?

There could then be a convention to index Bible recordings in the filename, as suggested by someone above, which would bring up the results in Bible-order.

Not sure if this would be technically doable, but I think it would be good if it were.

Thanks,
Carl.
American Psychology 1922-1947. It's the nearest thing to American Psycho that we are allowed to record.
hugh
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Post by hugh »

this is how gutenberg does it, eg for a search of "Genesis"

http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/results.php?title=genesis&sourceid=Mozilla-search

so genesis is cataloged as:
"The Bible, King James version, Book 1: Genesis"
etc.

I think that's a good way to solve this problem, we just need to be consistent in how we catalog. and decide, for sorting purposes, whether we should sort by:

-Version, so we would catalog as:
"The Bible, King James version, Book 1: Genesis"

or

-Book, so we could catalog as:
"The Bible, Book 1: Genesis (King James version)"

Kri: you are correct about doing this for all bits of a bigger religious text, in fact it should be our catalogging approach for any part of a bigger work. For instance,

* Koran, Book 2: Something (Smith translation)
* History of LibriVox, Volume 1: Making of the Catalog

If "Making of the Catalog" is part of a bigger project (History of LibriVox), then it should be cataloged as such, even if we only have 3 volumes of the 15 volume work....as eventually, in principle, we should have them all.
12makoto
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Post by 12makoto »

Hey, Kri, what is the max char length of the title field in the new system?

I wasn't trying to say that we need to actually use manually created menu pages, I do web work (front-end/back-end) for 9+ hrs. a day, so I wouldn't want people to waste all that time either. I just didn't know if we had addressed crazy works that are really collections such as the Bible and others. I didn't know what else to use to refer to something similar to "menu" so these works could be collected and ordered. Using names is a way to accomplish it (and probably one of the best), but we'd be looking at loong names to include all of that information, but definitely seems to be a whole lot easier.

If we start re-naming, for consistency, I would vote for something like:
Bible (version) ##: Book Title

That way all of the versions would appear together. Otherwise the versions would alternate list would look something like:
Bible 01: Genesis (ASV)
Bible 01: Genesis (DR)
Bible 01: Genesis (KJV)
Bible 01: Genesis (WEB)
Bible 02: Exodus (ASV)
Bible 02: Exodus (DR)
Bible 02: Exodus (KJV)
Bible 02: Exodus (WEB)

But, even that wouldn't be a horrible way as the user could futher refine the search using better parameters.

Anyway, just talking some ideas outloud and trying to brainstorm a little. (Just using the Bible as an example and it would apply to other works as well.)

Sean
[url=http://librivox.org/wiki/moin.cgi/ListOfReadersCatalogNames]Sean's Catalog Info[/url] | [url=http://librivox.org/wiki/moin.cgi/SeanMcKinley]Sean's Projects[/url]
kri
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Post by kri »

It seems to me that if we rely too much on the title, the titles will get cluttered. They should be as clear as possible to explain what the project is, not used for classification. I wonder if we should rely more on the genres (Annie, Betsie?) This would work for the specific example of the Bible. For different versions of the bible, that should probably be specified in the title (KJV, etc). I don't know of any other projects that we had menu pages for that don't include their classification in the title. Aesop's Fables all are titled Aesop's Fables. The History of England volumes are all titled the same, etc. I really think the Bible is a unique situation, not an example of something that will happen with other projects. Can you think of any other examples similar to the Bible, that isn't the Bible? I don't see any.
kri
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Post by kri »

There is no title character limit.
12makoto
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Post by 12makoto »

kri wrote:There is no title character limit.
I have a sneeky suspicion that the column in your database table may disagree with that. They usually tend to.
kri wrote:Can you think of any other examples similar to the Bible, that isn't the Bible? I don't see any.
I believe mentioned before in this thread have been the Bible, Torah, Book of Mormon, Qur'an, The Chronicles of Canada, and possibly more.
kri wrote:I wonder if we should rely more on the genres
You'd have to be willing to setup all holy books of all religions that way with genres, as well as any other wierd volume of works that my come up in the future. The other problem with genres is that it doesn't allow for ordering. There would have to be artificial volume numbers setup at the beginning of the title to achieve that effect.

Book of Mormon: 15 books
Chronicles of Canada: 16 Volumes
Hebrew scriptures: 24 books
Bible: some 67 books, others 70 books
Qur'an: 114 Sura (or Books)

None of which have easily organizable names. If I'm pulling up over 100 works for the Qur'an and 70 books for the Bible, the last thing I would want to do as a user is have to sort through them and put them in order myself when I'm trying to download them. That's a huge waste of time. Just suggesting a couple of things to consider.

Sean
[url=http://librivox.org/wiki/moin.cgi/ListOfReadersCatalogNames]Sean's Catalog Info[/url] | [url=http://librivox.org/wiki/moin.cgi/SeanMcKinley]Sean's Projects[/url]
kri
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Post by kri »

Again, there is no title character limit, and I don't see how there would be. There's no character limit for the description field, and those can get pretty long. There should be no problem with the title either.

You seem to say that we need to prepare for every eventuality. If we decided to use the genre to help classify collections more, why would we need to create genres for works that we haven't even done yet?

I think we should do something that combines the use of genres, and classification information in the title. For example, the Chronicles of Canada work that we have should have "Chronicles of Canada" in the title.

Why do the results need to be ordered in the order that they come in whatever main collection they arive? If they're not volumes, then they don't need volume numbers. If they return as separate search results then they are separately cataloged works that are (for the purposes of LV) considered separate. The user can choose to download and use them as a whole if they wish, but they'll have to make separate downloads. Even if the results for all books of the KJV Bible were ordered properly, and the user downloaded them, they would no longer be sorted properly on their computer, as there's nothing to tell them to do so. They would be separate zip files, that would probably sort alphabetically.
CarlManchester
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Post by CarlManchester »

kri wrote:I think we should do something that combines the use of genres, and classification information in the title. For example, the Chronicles of Canada work that we have should have "Chronicles of Canada" in the title.
I kind of agree, but in this context it would mean making the Bible, the Koran etc genres in their own right which doesn't seem quite right. It would seem even less right if "A History of Sussex in 80 volumes" (okay I've made this up, but for example), or an encylopaedia gets recorded.

An encyclodpaedia would be a very good example of why something, at least should be sorted out. As things are at the moment, every volume would surely have to be tagged with every genre (?), and would therefore come up in every genre search.

To get round the problem of having to create genres which are not really genres, could a new set of tags be created (say "Collected works"). This could be set up in exactly the same way as genres, but the tags would be "Bible", "Koran" etc. This new set of tags would not relate directly to anything on the search form.

Then, when a genre search is performed, one of the hits would be a link such as "Books of the Bible" which, when clicked, would perform a search, and return the relevant recordings (preferably in order).

Each time a new collected work were catalogued, there would need to be someone to set up a new collected works tag to go with it, but this would be less work than creating catalogue pages. The amount of work could also be reduced by stipulating a minimum number of volumes needed for a work to qualify.

Only thing is, I have no idea whether it will be possible to make a genre search return a link such as "Books of the Bible", which may make the whole thing unworkable.
kri wrote:Even if the results for all books of the KJV Bible were ordered properly, and the user downloaded them, they would no longer be sorted properly on their computer, as there's nothing to tell them to do so. They would be separate zip files, that would probably sort alphabetically.
This would suggest that there ought to be a convention as to filenames for collected works, as is currently the case with sections of a single project.

Cheers,
Carl.
American Psychology 1922-1947. It's the nearest thing to American Psycho that we are allowed to record.
hugh
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Post by hugh »

there seems to be much cpu power going towards this issue. we should/will name books in such a way that if they are part of a bigger collection, they will appear in a search containing the title of that collection, or bigger work.

eg: Bible (KJV), Book 1: Genesis ... (or a variation thereof).

so that:
a) a search for bible returns all the books of the Bible
b) the results are organized in the correct order, that is starting with Genesis rather than the Book of John.

this then looks more like a nicely laid-out menu page, which is where this dicussion began.

we do not need a new genre for each religious text, because their "genre" is "Religious Text."

we do not need to reinvent the wheel. librarians have spent the last several thousand years figuring out how to organize books - and we have many here at LV who can help us do that in a sensible way.

re: title field: it is long enough that we have not run into any troubles yet. tis (or digisage) can tell us exactly how many chars can go in there, since they built the back end, but so far it is long enough.
Gesine
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Post by Gesine »

I believe tis (Chris) said the title field has no character limit at all. There was a limit once, we had a bug report, and that was his response.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination circles the world." Albert Einstein
hugh
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Post by hugh »

my physics professors would be skeptical, I think, but tis, as far as i can tell, has a much better relationship with the laws of physics than the rest of us.
hugh
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Post by hugh »

So we are now listing authors, and sorting by authors alphabetically! ... here is what you get if you browse "fiction"

http://librivox.org/newcatalog/search.php?cat=Fiction
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