[bradknowles]

Folks,

So, is anyone else here interested in keeping their books physically organized, as well as being organized in the program?

Myself, I'd really like to see DL pull information from the Library of Congress website (and others around the world), to obtain classification numbers for the books in my library. LibraryThing.com hooks up to almost 200 different sites around the world, and can pull down classification information from any of them that have the information in question. Why can't DL do the same?

I'd also like to see DL be able to either batch print sheets of laser printed labels, or interface directly to a one-at-a-time thermal label printer, so that I can bring the books into the database with some sort of scanner (or even manually entering the ISBN), have it pull down the classification information, then print out the label, apply the label, and then file the book. And do all of this as one smooth process -- any time we get a new book, we go to the library and scan it in, get the label, apply the label to the book, and then off we go.

Am I the only one?

[ThisMessIAmIn]

You are definitely not the only one. I for one would like to see DM gain some features of a real library catalog system.

[LibraryThingTim]

I just sent Will an email about this. It's actually not that easy to do z39.50/MARC/SRW-access correctly. We spent six months with one of the top library programmers coming up with the perfect solution.

Internally, it's a web service that "looks" like Amazon XML—with extra fields, if you want them—so it could be offered to DL easily. It handles 175 libraries now, and will hit 700 within a month or two. It handles MARC21 and variants (USMARC, CANMARC, etc.), UNIMARC, DANMARK, RUSMARC and other formats, Latin, Cyrilic, Greek, Arabic, Thai and other scripts.

I do hope we can work something out. I'd love to see DL used in conjunction with LT somehow.

[Delicious Monster]

The biggest reason we don't pull information from 200 data sources 'round the globe is because it's easier to just pull the information from Amazon. The amount of good achieved by adding more data sources decreases logarithmically, while the amount of work it takes to maintain all those sources increases linearly. Amazon gets us 90% of the way there and frees us to work on other things.

That said, and as has been discussed elsewhere in the forum, it's possible to get data into Delicious Library, and we've done a lot of work to make it even easier to get data into Delicious Library 2.

As for Dewey and the Library of Congress, we've picked up Dewey from Amazon in Delicious Library 2, and added a Library of Congress field. The latter is important because Library of Congress call numbers have their own special sorting algorithm.

We don't pull the Library of Congress numbers directly, but in the interim I've written an AppleScript that will fill in any missing Library of Congress numbers, using SRU.

...and of course custom printing templates, for all your label-making needs.

[Morbus Iff]

And that AppleScript will be shipped with the beta, which I'll be invited to today, right?

As a non-AppleScript person (ie., I can muddle by in a hackish way but, say, converting my entire Perl script into a full-fledged AppleScript is head-scratching), I'm starting to get curious on how the workflow will be. Will the AppleScript to "get other data into DL" require that I a) specifically set variables within AppleScript ("set illustrator field to Monkey", etc.) or b) give DL a bucket of data ("here's a comma-spliced list, just like you're importing"). Ideally, for my AppleScript-retardedness, the comma-spliced list would be handy (as I could just Run Shell Script my Perl thing, store it's CSV into a variable, and send that to DL).

And when will the AppleScript trigger? When I'm adding an item, will I need to specifically call my "Add Comicbook from GCD" AppleScript first, and let that handle everything? Or would I enter my lookup into DL, and it'd call any trigger AppleScript's that it knows about?

[Delicious Monster]

The script will ship with the beta, which you will be receive, but not today.

You will either be able to set properties individually, or as a list of key-value pairs (known in AppleScript as a "record").

As for how it will work, what I would do is create a little UI for entering comics that works like the form for manually looking up other media. The user selects "Add comics" from the scripting menu, gets the UI, and so it goes.

You really could get quite fancy with this.