Right - as of this minute, the P. Clark Memorial Library contains 24636 books, of which an estimated 12601 are unique titles. I'm sure it has been discussed before, but surely such a fine collection deserves a slightly better organization?
This is no criticism of the people running the site; they do a fine job
, and what I'm contemplating is a non-trivial task.
But first of all, something that hopefully is not too difficult to implement:
There already exists a good search function for finding books, but it's awfully well hidden away; I'm talking about not going to the library itself, but Forum->Library, select "Search Forum", select advanced search...
Would it be possible to make a more direct link to this search functionality when you go directly to the library through the "Ebooks" drop-down menu?
Next, is it possible to change book submissions so that instead of putting all information in the title line (Author, title, date etc) this could be entered via a form, ensuring that books are more conformal in their identification? Alternatively, could you have an automated conformity check on the title line in book submissions?
Finally, the big one: What about creating a proper library database, indexing books by author, language, submitter etc.?
From a cursory look, I estimate about 80% of the book titles can be automatically mapped to a database. That leaves quite a few thousand titles to be manually inspected, but with a small band of wannabe librarians and a bit of time, it shouldn't be an insuperable task, and it only has do be done once.
Waddya think?