Quote:
Originally Posted by chaley
There are two requests here: 1) to have a dewey column, and 2) to be able to collapse and expand the calibre library view (spreadsheet view) based on some sort.
As for 1) use a custom column. That will let your search and sort on them. You can even get subclassification search with saved searches using regexps...
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While I personally would have little or no use for Dewey Decimal entries (and probably the same for the average calibre user), after reading garcle's explanation, I can see how it would be useful to have a column that listed the Dewey system number. I also agree it would be superior in some ways to tags derived from social media since often the tags available that way are inadequate or nonexistant (the latter especially with older books). However, having to make a custom column, then manually populate each book would be a magnificent hurt in the donkey, especially for a new user with a few hundred to a few thousand books to import into calibre as well as for a current user with the same number of books already imported. Contrary to garcle's statement that most books have the Dewey Decimal printed inside books near the ISBN, when I checked the last couple of dozen books I scanned (I haven't destroyed and discarded them yet), only one, a fiction book, had a Dewey Decimal in it. Many older books didn't even have the ISBN and calibre had to to get the meta data from the title and author (those were the ones that were most likely to have inadequate or nonexistant meta data. Both of the "history" books (two books that were essentially autobiographies by a man who participated in Ireland's Revolution and
Civil War and have been used as textbooks in classes on Irish history). For a custom column to practical, calibre would have to be able to look up the Dewey Decimal online, similar to how it gets meta data. I seriously doubt that could be accomplished with a custom column and I'm guessing programming calibre to do the job would be less than simple. Still, I would think it would be worthy of consideration, especially since it would make calibre a more attractive alternative for budget strapped libraries to use in place of expensive commercial programs for managing e-books.