Saturday, July 15, 2006
Delicious Library: An Open Letter
An open letter to the developer's of my favorite library management software—Delicious Library.
I love Delicious Library. Delicious Library is a personal library management system. If you have no need for one, then you've probably never given the type of system a second thought. But, I have what I call a very small library of books and media. My friends and others consider it huge. It's less than 1,000 books, but I also have movies, television series, and music. So keeping track of them, organizing them, and managing them are major considerations for me.
I use to have a FileMaker database system for the job. I had designed it for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Campus Center at UW-Madison when I was it's director. We had wanted to create a lending library, while also be able to make rapid recommendations of books and media for professors who wanted to address sexual orientation or related issues in class. The FileMaker database was great and handy, but the all the data entry was manual. The problem with manual data entry systems are that you have to rely on people to keep the data up-to date. Not a bad thing when your just adding Title & Author, but even those of us who are anal can bulk at entering full book data—title, author, isbn, description, categories, published, etc., etc.—into a library system.
So I was always on the look out for something that could make library management, simple and easy. Along come Delicious Library. It was fast, slick, beautiful, and more importantly entering data was a simple as owning a barcode scanner. I immediately started scanning in around 700 books, 200+ movies, etc. What normally would have been a multi-month project of data entry, was handled in just a couple of weekends of small shifts (3-5hr shifts). What I loved about it most is I could add upkeep to a routine, and my library information rarely fell behind. As new books came in, I'd take them out of the box, and scan them. Walla. They are now part of my managed collection. But we all get lazy sometimes, so I also designated a single shelf for incoming items (books, videos, etc.). That way, if I didn't scan them immediately, once a month I'd go back and process anything on the shelf. A routine. A simple pleasure.
So why then this open letter to the folks at Delicious Monster? Because while I've run into minor irritations in terms of lack of features with Delicious Library before, today is the first time I ran into the a lack of features and flexibility, that had me considering how complicated it might be to code an Amazon.com search into my own custom solution. Some of these items I consider basic, very basic. Others are more they'd be useful, or they fit my personal idiosyncrasies. So here they are.
Film Classification or Type Field
Currently form films and television series, when information comes back from Amazon about genre, I typically get something like: Feature Film-comedy or Adult Entertainment Rated R. Let's not discuss why Amazon categorizes most Gay & Lesbian films under adult entertainment, since that's not Delicious Monster's concern. But these genre classification brings up three issues for me: (1) I do want to know and keep the data of whether or not the film was a featured film, independent release, short, etc.; (2) I also want to keep if the primary classification is a Comedy, Drama, Horror, Science Fiction, Action films, etc.; and (3) My keeping or storing those two components of data should by no means effect my genre, sub-genre or category field data. So I recommend, a new field called Classification. That's where the current data imported from Amazon belongs, then I can go back and use the genre field as I like—as for both genre and sub-genres.
Tagging or Categories
Perhaps, I'm more anal than some, but I do like my genre fields to match closely to various official sources—say IMDB or the Library of Congress. So if I'm entering a film like Gia, then I want the genres listed as: Genre: Biography, Drama to match their listing. But I still want/need more specific tags such as: Lesbian & Gay, Bisexual, AIDS, Drugs, etc. At first I thought, let's add a sub-genre or categories field, but then I realized that maybe too limiting for some folks.
A keyword, category, or general label field for tagging. Think Flickr, or other social networking software. Tags could be anything I want, as many as I want, and would necessarily interfere with printing, but could be very useful in a some of my other feature requests.
Smart Lists/Shelves
The shelf idea is nice, but very limiting. It's like when Apple first introduced iTunes with Playlists. They were great, until people, like people will do, wanted ways to automate the generation of playlist. It's a natural progression—sometimes I want to carefully select every song on a playlist, and other times, I just want to select characteristics for a playlist. Apple introduces Smart Playlists to calm the growing furor, and I suggest the same for Delicious Library.
Shelves are nice, but I want my shelves, at least some of them, to be auto-updating, self-maintaining geniuses. Why should I have to remember to not only add the tag: Lesbian & Gay, but also to then drag that item to my Lesbian & Gay Film shelf. If I tag it Lesbian & Gay it should display on my Lesbian & Gay film shelf. A single action, multiple results, as pre-defined by me.
Folders or Sub-Libraries
I only have ten shelves in my library. Why? Because, I consistently force myself to not add more because shelves can't be reordered or group. For this request, grouping is the more important function. For example, I work in the field of nonprofit technology. I'd love to have a shelves for Programming Languages, Web Design, PHP & MySQL, XHTML & CSS, Operating Systems, Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Scripting Languages, System Administration, Integrative Technologies, Human-Computer Interactions, Databases, FileMaker, MySQL, Data Modeling, etc, etc., etc.
The problem is I don't want to see 20 odd some shelves all related to technology, all the time. Especially, when I could also easily have another 20 odd shelves related to nonprofit organizations, or history, or theology. What I'd like to see is a generic folder or library icon, next to a generic higher classification such as: technology. So my technology library, may have shelves on any or all the items listed above, as well as contain addition libraries/folders such as: Web, Database, or System Admin.
Please, o' please add both Smart Lists and Grouping features. The beauty of having a digitally managed library is you can do with it hundreds of things that you can't do with your physical library. If I have the book PHP and MySQL Web Development, which I do. In my physical library, I have to chose—my PHP shelf, my MySQL shelf, or my Web Development shelf. But digitally, I can file it on all three shelves, as well as under my generic database, programming languages, and scripting languages shelves; then have them all be grouped within the same sub-library or folder.
Printing
Wow, this is a massive area, and one of the primary reasons for this long post. So today, I was reorganizing my DVDs. I have three basic groupings: Television, Lesbian & Gay/Queer Films, and everything else. My Television collection has grown beyond the single media case—a Beechwood Two Tier, Tilt Shelf Bookcase, so I decided to hide away some of my VHS tapes, in favor of more shelving room. I still have space for one more Beechwood shelf, but I've been holding off. Besides, I rarely use the videos anymore, DVD has definitely one the format war in my house. You can fit two or three of them in the same space as a single VHS.
So the issue—I want to print a shelf list! This should be a relatively simple task. I have my main collection, which is getting moved over by one bookcase. Since this involves me manually moving a number of DVDs, why not make sure they are in alphabetical order, and nothings missing or misfiled at the same time. A shelf list. Libraries use them all the time. It's easy to make filing mistakes when ones in a hurry or just not thinking about the task at hand. For example, my copy of "A Very Long Engagement" was filed in the "A's" despite my general preference for ignoring—A and The—in titles. All I wanted was to print an alphabetical list of videos that were in my "main library", detailing title, director, and genre. With this, I could tell if it was misfiled or missing, as well as correct those little alphabetical mistakes. Capote should be on my Lesbian & Gay shelf, not the main library. Fists of Fury comes after Fist of Legend despite my inclination to prioritize Bruce Lee over Jet Li, both of whom I love.
Additionally, I should be able to specify which fields I want to print when printing. Having images for printed catalogs is great, but I often don't want or need the book or video image when printing; and I typically want random reports—which films are unwatched, which films are unrated, which films aren't properly categorized, etc., etc. I'm willing to change the print view in list mode or under printer specifications, but options are sorely needed.
Custom Fields
The ability to add custom fields would have probably stopped me from complaining about Tagging and Classification, though I still think those features are nice within their own right. Sometimes, I just want to keep track of random information, but consistently. So it's not really a note. For example, in my garden books, I like to track who was the photographer. For some of my books, I track the authors various pseudonyms. I don't expect Delicious Library to add those fields, but it would be great if I could.
Now, I'm thinking Apple's Address Book here. You click on a little plus sign to add a new field to a field grouping. You create a custom label for the field, and go about entering your data. I'm prone to having the custom field exist on every record or at least every record by major type—book, movies, music, etc.. But I'm not against Apple's implementation of it existing for just the current record either. But it would be great to add a Photographer or Pseudonym field. So that my notes field can be used for reviews, quotations, or actual notes like —replanting Bromelaids is on page 59.
Hide/Omit Records
This is my second to last request, but it's a powerful one. The ability to hide or omit records from found sets for whatever reason. This works will for printing purposes. Let's go back to my Lesbian & Gay film collection. My LGB Shelf is mostly films that meet the lesbian, gay, bisexual qualifications, but occasionally I want to place a straight film there just because it contained a scene of importance to the lesbian and gay community or to my lesbian sensibilities. A nice example is the film, Laurel Canyon. Pretty much a straight film, except for the very strong subtext that Kate Beckinsale's Alex would willing dump her boyfriend/fiance, Christian Bale as Sam, for Sam's mother, Jane played by the lovely and talented Frances McDormand. Batman dumped for the pregnant Fargo cop—now that's queer cinema. Besides is it just me but Fances McDormand just keeps getting hotter with age. Some women just come into their own after 40.
But I digress, the issue is is while I may want to keep Laurel Canyon on my digital Lesbian and Gay bookshelf, I don't want it on my printed shelf list, so I'd like to be able to hide or omit it, temporarily from view so I could then print or otherwise manipulate my media.
Multiple Record Edits
This is my last feature request. Why? O' why can't I edit multiple records at the same? I was attempting to update genre's when I discovered, that I'd have to modify them one at a time, instead of my selected fifty records. Boy does that suck. So I played around, and it seems that I can update ratings and notes in one fell swoop, so why note other fields? Sure, omit titles from multiple record updates. But if I want to add O'Reilly Press or 1st Edition to 30 or 40 books at a time, then I should be able to. Admittedly, I'm willing to accept responsibility for any mistakes I make, but a warning should be sufficient for the clueless. Managing a library takes effort, and anything that can be done to reduce those efforts are good deeds.
Okay, so that was my last official feature request, but I do have another little tidbit to be considered—Add a Backup Menu Option. I feel somewhat safe since my backup script, does copy my Delicious Library file. But I'd feel more secure, if I could randomly save a copy of my library to my documents folder. Yes, I can do so manually. And I do on occasion, now that I know which files to backup, but I'd do so more frequently, if there was just an option to backup in the File Menu.
So that's my open letter, chocked full of suggestions. I'm excited for a new version of Delicious Library and hope and pray that some of these features will be addressed.
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Categories: Movies •Music •Technology •Television •
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