[Lady Fitzgerald]

All my magazines are searchable PDFs scanned from DTB rags. Although I haven't had time to do so yet (too many irons in the fire and my computer is in the shop), I plan on keeping my magazines in a separate library. I would combine each magazine title into yearly portfolios (for search purposes) and list them in calibre by portfolio. Each portfolio will contain a PDF with copies of the Tables of Contents from each magazine in the portfolio (for manual searching when search words don't come to mind). Since I don't have that many titles to work with (less than a dozen), I'll probably list them by Title with the year of the portfolio included in the title. Right now I see no need for any other columns (I can always add them later if need be) which is the reason for using a separate library; I can display only the Title column if I choose. Trying to add tags to each issue would be a nightmare and I know darned well I'll miss a huge number of them. Since the PDFs are searchable, I can just do my searches within each portfolio. I'm also going to see if portfolios can be put into portfolios, again for searching purposes. I may not even use calibre for magazines since a flat folder/filename hierarchy would probably be quite adequate. I'll make that determination once I start learning how to work with PDF portfolios.

Individual tech articles are a different story. Adding tags for those will be much simpler since the scope of each article is usually very specific and the articles themselves are generally short (the ones I have are, anyway; they are articles I have copied from the internet for personal use only) and calibre would be very useful for searching and sorting. Again, they would get their own library.

A quick word on libraries (ok, maybe not so quick). I use multiple libraries because certain genres will use genre specific custom columns and I don't want unneeded ones cluttering up my screen, forcing frequent horizontal scrolling. Right now, I have two active libraries, Books and Comics. I have an inactive library for Sheet Music and Songbooks that I set up for experimental purposes since I haven't gotten around to scanning all of my sheet music and songbooks yet.

Libraries are also useful when more than one person is keeping their personal collection of books on a shared computer. Beyond these reasons, multiple libraries can inhibit calibre's ability to mange books for you. Using a seperate library for each genre is one example. Many books can be classed under more than one genre. Authors frequently write in more than one genre. Calibre can sort books by genre and/or author for you. Putting them in separate libraries will hamstring calibre's ability to generate complete lists of each category unless you duplicate books (and avoiding duplicating books is one reason for using calibre). Even collections of books owned by different individuals on the same computer can be sorted into separate listings within calibre but separate libriaries make backing up and transferring to to different computers a bit easier.

The main point I'm trying to make is to not get carried away with multiple libraries when calibre is capable of performing the same function.