Editing Metadata Remotely

[Alexires]

Hello,

I realise that it is frowned down upon a newbie making a new thread, however I have searched google and this site for mentions of my topic of interest to no avail.

I have Calibre and it looks exactly like the program I need, with one flaw: I don't know if it will allow the editing of metadata remotely.

I have a massive library of Chemistry and Physics books, journal articles and chapter from books which doesn't contain metadata and the filenames are inaccurate as well.

As the library is far too big to catalogue solely, it would be of a great help to have others be able to open the files, read the title/authors/ISBN/etc. and then fill in the metadata for the file (either allowing Calibre to attempt to retrieve it from the internet, or manually).

Tell me, does Calibre allow this, is there a plugin which does this, and if not, where can I suggest it for future releases?

Edit: Also, is there a way to add multiple users to Calibre so that I can limit access?

[Manichean]

Originally Posted by Alexires

Hello,

I realise that it is frowned down upon a newbie making a new thread, however I have searched google and this site for mentions of my topic of interest to no avail.

It is only if it perpetuates a discussion that has been done countless times before and/or repeats a topic that is easily found by searching the forums.

I have Calibre and it looks exactly like the program I need, with one flaw: I don't know if it will allow the editing of metadata remotely.

I have a massive library of Chemistry and Physics books, journal articles and chapter from books which doesn't contain metadata and the filenames are inaccurate as well.

As the library is far too big to catalogue solely, it would be of a great help to have others be able to open the files, read the title/authors/ISBN/etc. and then fill in the metadata for the file (either allowing Calibre to attempt to retrieve it from the internet, or manually).

Tell me, does Calibre allow this, is there a plugin which does this, and if not, where can I suggest it for future releases?

Remote editing isn't supported. You could put the library in a publicly accessible network location and let each contributor point his or her own copy of Calibre to said library, however, you'd probably enter a world of pain as soon as two copies connect to the library simultaneously. You may want to consider giving out small chunks of your library to correct the metadata on and reintegrating them into a master copy that you maintain locally.

Edit: Also, is there a way to add multiple users to Calibre so that I can limit access?

Do you mean locally or via the Calibre server? Locally, you can of course use your OS's account management to restrict access to either the Calibre library and/or Calibre itself. If you're thinking about the server, then each instance of the server can only have one user/pass combination. I don't know if it is possible to run multiple instances of the server in parallel.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Alexires

Hello,

I realise that it is frowned down upon a newbie making a new thread, however I have searched google and this site for mentions of my topic of interest to no avail.

I have Calibre and it looks exactly like the program I need, with one flaw: I don't know if it will allow the editing of metadata remotely.

I have a massive library of Chemistry and Physics books, journal articles and chapter from books which doesn't contain metadata and the filenames are inaccurate as well.

As the library is far too big to catalogue solely, it would be of a great help to have others be able to open the files, read the title/authors/ISBN/etc. and then fill in the metadata for the file (either allowing Calibre to attempt to retrieve it from the internet, or manually).

Tell me, does Calibre allow this, is there a plugin which does this, and if not, where can I suggest it for future releases?

Edit: Also, is there a way to add multiple users to Calibre so that I can limit access?

All I can think of is to split your existing library (Move selected titles) to a new <username>_Library (a right-click operation).
Now each user has "A" small, single-user library to work on.
When these become done, the user,quits Calibre and You merge their library into a New, "done-fixed-it-up" Library.

The reason for this convoluted scheme, is Calibre has no good way to merge-match any book that the Title or Author has been changed (even a case change) . Moving/copying and merging (re-)assign Calibre index numbers, so that is not a solution.

You might be able to have them edit a file created using

calibredb show_metadata --as-opf 1426 >foo1426.txt

where 1426 is the index number ( hover over the open in the book Details window to see #) of the book in the record and foo.1426.txt will be the matching file to edit.

Then (NOT TESTED. danger Will Robinson)
(read the command line interface manual section)

you might be able to use

calibredb set_metadata 1426  foo1426.txt

to update YOUR library
The developers may or have a better

[Alexires]

I thank you all for your help.

Unfortunately that is not exactly what I am looking for.

What I was thinking was, say users go to example.org where they are prompted for a username and password. After inputting their unique username/password combo, they are then allowed to search the library, view documents either online or download them and then, given sufficient permissions, edit the metadata for that file so that it accurately reflects the file contents.

This means I don't need to edit the metadata myself (an impossible task) and also provides a framework to track who has downloaded what and who is contributing to the site by updating the metadata.

[Manichean]

Given time and sufficient script support on the server, you ought to be able to build such a system using the Calibre command line tools, however, out of the box, Calibre doesn't support such a thing.