Additional Columns

[dvs0826]

I think it would be useful to provide additional columns "Journal Title", "Volume", and "Issue" in the metadata. Currently the best solution I've come up with is to store the Journal title in the Series field, and then set the volume and issue number as tags.

[kovidgoyal]

calibre isn't really designed for storing academic publications. To do that it would need support for citations, cross references, etc.

Indeed, the whole GUI would have to be significantly different. At some point in the future, I may design an alternate GUI, database backend, etc for academic publications, but not in the short term.

In the meantime I'd suggest you try Zotero which has been designed expressly for this purpose.

[dvs0826]

I took a look at Zotero as per your suggestion, and while it seems like a pretty awesome tool which I'll indeed make use of, I'm not sure how well it works for my current rather large collection of journal articles. To make full use of it you need an internet connection since it references files online, and I often read articles where no internet connection is available (for example while on a plane or in a hotel).

I realize that adding the columns mentioned above would be a little domain specific, so what about user-defined columns, which is just a general case of what I proposed above and would be usable by pretty much everyone? The additional schema / column data could just be stored in the metadata database rather than in the actual file. Not sure with the current database format how feasible / how much work that is but it seems useful to a wide audience.

[kovidgoyal]

User defined columns are on my longer term TODO list. Unfortunately, there are only so many hours in a day