magazines organize

[aboettget]

How can I organize the magazines in Calibre? Especially the year and issue number.

[itimpi]

I do not think there is a standard way of doing this.

Personally I use the Series field to identify the magazine, and then the series number field for the year and/or issue. For instance 2013.03 would indicate the March issue for this year. This works well as I can then sort on the Series field to get an order that is independent of what is in the title field.

[theducks]

I use the Itimpi method in Series.

For the Title I use <shortened_magazine name>[MM.YYYY]
eg. Analog 06 2005
for: Analog Science Fiction and Fact, June 2005

Whatever way you choose, keep in mind Sorting on differing fields. Remember to pad leading 0's (spaces are too hard to count ) to maintain the maximum digits ever expected. Allow/have a plan for exceptions.
Analog has a double issue:
Analog 07-08 2007 for
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, July-August 2007
Series: Analog[2007.7] (only the lower month)

[aboettget]

Ok, I understand. Thank you.

[MSOlsen]

I have a large number of professional journals and magazines, and I'm having some difficulty with Titles in the Metadata.

Generally, I place the name of the periodical in the 'Series' box and enter the volume & issue in the 'Number' box (e.g Vol 12, issue 8 => 12.8). As for the issue date, I always use the earliest listed and place that in the 'Published' box, entering the 1st when a day is not given and Jan 1st when only a year is given. This works well for organizing the individual periodicals, Volumes, and Issues; however, it leaves me at odds as to what to place in the 'Title' box. All of them have multiple articles, and most of them don't have a unique title for a given issue.

A suggestion for a future feature:
It would be nice to have drop box where we could indicate the type of print publication (e.g. book, periodical, or web page), and for multiple 'article' titles in a similar way to the author field (e.g. for a periodical: 'Series' would be the publication name, 'Title' would be for each article, and 'Number' would represent volume and issue). This would also be handy for collected works, anthologies, etc.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by theducks

I use the Itimpi method in Series.

For the Title I use <shortened_magazine name>[MM.YYYY]
eg. Analog 06 2005
for: Analog Science Fiction and Fact, June 2005

Whatever way you choose, keep in mind Sorting on differing fields. Remember to pad leading 0's (spaces are too hard to count ) to maintain the maximum digits ever expected. Allow/have a plan for exceptions.
Analog has a double issue:
Analog 07-08 2007 for
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, July-August 2007
Series: Analog[2007.7] (only the lower month)

I do something similar, but allow the title to be a sort field as well, by putting the year first. E.g. Analog SF 2013 06 and for the series I use the volume number for the integer and the month for the decimal, e.g. [173.06]

[MSOlsen]

But how do you deal with listing the various articles within a periodical/magazine. That is, How do you search for articles within a given magazine?

Placing the name of the Magazine in the 'Title' field doesn't help. That just means I have a very large number of book all with essentially the same title (i.e. the only difference is the encoded date). Also, as the name of the magazine is already placed in the 'Series' field, repeating it in the 'Title' field is meaningless and redundant.

What is needed is a way to assign the individual article titles to a field. Using tags is not practical because this would interfere with the use of tags for other books (i.e. as one word or short phrase topical searches). However, if the 'Title' field could be set up to allow for multiple titles, similar to the way tags and authors handle multiples, then one could simply enter the titles of the articles. This of course would be a new feature.

For now the question is how do we handle multiple Titles (read article titles) for a single publication (magazine, etc.)

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by MSOlsen

For now the question is how do we handle multiple Titles (read article titles) for a single publication (magazine, etc.)

Full Text search?

But you have a fair point. It would be a neat feature.

[MSOlsen]

Originally Posted by MSOlsen

For now the question is how do we handle multiple Titles (read article titles) for a single publication (magazine, etc.)

There are a large number of publications (omnibus, anthologies, news papers, etc.) that a named, multi-Title publications; therefore this not a trivial concern.

As an engineering professional, I receive, and read, roughly 5 professional journals each month. All of these are PDFs and the don't convert well into Epubs. Therefore using the EpubSplit plug-in is not helpful.

If any of the previous suggestions are used, the result is a 'pile' of books who's title vary only by a date code. It would take far too long to do a full text search of each one every time I needed to find a particular article. Even putting a copy of the ToC in the metadata's comment field - though a marked improvement - fails to achieve to goal/purpose behind a library program like calbre.

Any ideas as to a good "work around" until a plug-in can be done?

[kovidgoyal]

Go to Preferences->Add your own column, create a text column with multiple entries, like tags, and enter as many titles as you like into it. Create another of type enumeration and fill it with your publication types.

And I dont see how putting the toc into the comments field fails to achieve the "goal" of calibre. If you want some data to be searchable, it has to be present somewhere, either in a custom column or the comments field. Someday, I will add full text search to calibre, at which time, even this requirement will no longer exist.

The title is most definitely not going to become a multiple valued field.

[BetterRed]

I keep journals in a separate library.

I put the Journal Name in Author and the edition identifier (volume no, date, whatever) in the Title. I tried various alternatives but this works best for me.

I have a Peoples Names column for Authors, and a TOC in the Comments.

It would be nice if I could 'label' the Author and Title columns as Journal and Edition - but I can live with it as it is

===================
Re Content Search

We use the OS (Windows & OS/X) to do content searching, from there its trivial to generate an 'author and title' list or csv to push into the Import List plug in. We want to include things in the search that are not in Calibre, such as email, web clippings, spreadsheets... etc.

BR

[MSOlsen]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Go to Preferences->Add your own column, create a text column with multiple entries, like tags, and enter as many titles as you like into it. Create another of type enumeration and fill it with your publication types.

And I dont see how putting the toc into the comments field fails to achieve the "goal" of calibre. If you want some data to be searchable, it has to be present somewhere, either in a custom column or the comments field.

Dear Kovidgoval,

Thanks for an outstanding suggestion. I am very glad that this forum exists and that you take such an active role. Of the many forums I participate in, this is definitely one of the better ones, and having the inventor active is a MAJOR plus.

I was not aware that the comments field was searchable, as I never had a search return results from that field. I will definitely look into it as such could prove most useful.

As for you suggestion of the adding the columns, again, thank you. I find I personally miss the obvious when I am too close to the problem. I can understand where making the 'Title' field a multi-entry item would cause a great deal of problems, but I was not able to think around the issue. Hence my posts asking for ideas. I will definitely let everyone know how well the custom columns work. If well, this could become a future plug-in.