Library

[stoutfellow]

The programming bug has bitten me again. Now that I've got my financial database working to my satisfaction, I've started revamping my library database. I basically had the same complaints about it as I had with the other, and with that project as a warmup I can see how to improve the other setup. This will be more challenging than the first, though; among other things, I'll have to deal with multiple names for the same author, or at least multiple variants. I think I can see how to handle that; I'm in the process of designing a form which will test whether that idea will work. Once that's cleared up, I'll start working on the procedures for entering the contents of a book and for attaching keywords to a given piece of writing.

(One of the things that's been most tedious, to date: I have a number of "The Writings of..." from the Library of America, and most of them include a lot of letters. Entering "Letter to :name:, :month: :day:, :year:" gets tiresome, but I think I see a way to streamline it. Another difficult point has to do with poems. Some lyric poems don't have titles; they have to be recorded by their first lines, or part of those lines. On the other hand, Palgrave, in the Golden Treasury, insisted on giving every poem a title - even if the poet had given it a different one.... I have a faint glimmering of a way to deal with that, too. But we'll see.)

:rubs hands:
:rolls up sleeves:

Comments

[mmegaera]

You should have been a cataloger [g]. Or maybe gone into library catalog design?

[stoutfellow]

Some years back, I did a little poking around in classification schemes, and was much taken with Ranganathan's Colon Classification system. The system I'm planning to use is inspired by it, although the implementation is very different. (For one thing, I'm not confining myself to a single alphanumeric string....)