New Features

Import Your Collection Spreadsheet

I've been promising this for a while, and popular demand has been unprecedented! (ie: one individual request... and thanks to Rob for sharing his LibraryThing export file for testing.) If you have your personal collection organized in a spreadsheet (or database that can export a CSV file) you can now bring that into your MagicLibrary.org account with a minimum of fuss.

When you import your spreadsheet, the system will attempt to match up titles, then present you with a list of possibilites. Nothing happens automatically, but gives you the option to manually approve, find, or create the corresponding record in our database. Then you can add all the approved items into your personal collections.

Duplicate Item Merging

Speaking of matching things, when you view the page for an item it will search the database for possible duplications. (For example, the same trick which was published in two different books.) If anything is found, you will see a panel to review and associate duplicate items.

Improvements

• Tweak AI Instructions for TOC Scanning to better parse the images.
• Active Collection Sorting puts your recently updated collections at the top of the list.
• Search Result Loading Speed made more efficient now that there's enough books to have created a slow-down.
• Reprint and Edition Management to better sort multiple printings of a book.
• Roman Numeral Sorting for book introductions and other frontspiece items that aren't using arabic numbers.

On the Roadmap

The library shelves are starting to fill up! With a special thanks to Jamie Claus for earning his Legendary Contributor badge in record time this past couple months. With all this real information to display it reveals how the display of records can be improved to reduce visual clutter.

I'm planning for a major overhaul to the pages for People and Companies to list the work they have been involved in, especially for those heavy hitters whose list has grown unreasonably long.

The Table of Contents listings for books is also going back to the drawing board to better condense more information, and display better on mobile devices.

An Experiment with AI Summaries

I've been very pleased with the results of using AI for turning a book's Table of Contents page into formatted text to enter into the database. It's tedious work well suited for a robot. This week I tried feeding an entire PDF copy of a book into AI with instructions to not only list the TOC but also generate short summaries of each item in the book.

You can peek at the results for the items in Annemann's Miracles of Card Magic.

The Divining Pasteboard - 6 - Four cards are selected and one is mentally chosen. After all four are returned to the deck, a face-up "diviner" card buried in the pack lies next to the thought-of selection.

Restless Cards - 82 - From red and blue decks, a card is freely chosen from each. The banded packets are tossed in the air — each now contains the other's selection, with mismatched back color.

It Goes This Way - 107 - A face-marking technique using a needle to scratch the suit indicators, complementing one-way back designs and allowing one-way principles to work face up as well.

The summaries are generally pretty good, and sometimes they really do capture the way a magician might speak about an item. I only noticed a few that seemed to focus too much on the unimportant details of cards being picked.

So the text is good, but... I can't help but feel it's missing the bigger point. The heart of this whole project is about my desire to spend more productive time actually reading my magic books. Copying and pasting a summary from AI means I didn't have to read the book. I didn't even read the entire summary most of the time. When AI shortcuts real human thinking, the result always rings hollow.