What's New

Collections and "My Library"

I've completed my to-do list set in last month's update regarding collections;

Add specific editions to your collection. The new pop-out drawer is a more detailed inventory. (DONE)
Add a note about the location. (DONE)
Add a note about ~~condition~~ whatever you want. (DONE)
Be able to add multiple copies of any edition. (DONE)
Track the date it was acquired. (DONE)
Track the cost of aquisition. Also add your personal estimation of value. And the option to select a base currency for your library. (DONE)
Search within your collected titles to find what you already own. (DONE)

AI image reader for Contents data entry

Take a look at the Help page (with a video demo) on how to Extract Book Contents From A Photo. This is exciting stuff and seriously saves time on manual data entry.

More powerful search engine

Previously library searches were just simple text matches, which has no forgiveness for misspellings, or different formatting of words. Very dumb!

I've booted up a new search engine which has all the brain power to find what you're looking for. It returns more results for every search, and sorts them in order of (what it considers) most relevant. For example, a search for "Silk" would bring back books with Silk in the title before those with the word buried in the description.

Any good search engine requires "tuning" as well, so over time, and with more data in our system, I'll be able to improve the results.

1000 books and counting

I spent many hours using the library as well. I've scanned in cover images, and entered basic information (format, year, authors) for hundreds of lecture notes, booklets and books this past month. We crossed the milestone of 1000 books in the system. I've got one more shelf to go (my large size books) and then I have to dig in to my collection of digital books.

THere's still much work to be done to add the contents of these books. Much slower work, made all that much slower when you get distracted by the good stuff you find... but... that's the whole point!

What's Next

In chatting with my pal Rob he mentioned he'd love to be able to bring over his collection from LibraryThing (a non-magic book collecting site) in one go. He kindly shared his exported spreadsheet for me to work with, so a Library Import feature is on the horizon.

The next focus will be working with the contents of a book, streamlining the process of entering and editing that information.

One fun item on my to-do list is to add a new built-in collection of Starred Items. This will be a toggle button down the list of contents to star (or un-star) individual tricks, moves, routines, etc. I've seen many an old book with exactly this written in pencil, so it makes sense to imitate it in digital form. It's a simple way to say "this one is worth remembering!"

Development will be slower this next month, as I'm travelling for the Pacific Coast Association of Magicians convention, and other work will keep me busy.