Organizing magazines and articles in Calibre

[Delosari]

Hi all

I apologize in advance if these questions have already been asked but I have not found a dedicated thread or answer in the FAQ.

1) I wonder if you could share with me some tips on how to put import magazines into calibre. Are we supposed to put the year and the month in the title box? Maybe there is a plugin to fill out the data?

2) Also has anyone tried to use calibre to organize a library of scientific papers? Maybe you would advise another program?

[itimpi]

Originally Posted by Delosari

1) I wonder if you could share with me some tips on how to put import magazines into calibre. Are we supposed to put the year and the month in the title box?

My personal preference is to put the Magazine type as a Series name, and the use the fact that the series number can be fractional to indicate the year and month (e.g. 2011.04 for April 2011). For magazines that go by issue number I put that into the Series index field instead. This means it is easy to search for them and put them into date/issue order.

Separately I tend to put items like the month and year into the Title to give a better human readable form. I also add a 'Magazine' tag so I can use that as a filter if needed.

However, I think this is one area where you have to decide what your preference actually is. The chances are that Calibre can acomodate whichever way you want to go.

[theducks]

Your 'plan' needs to consider that the Title and Author will be considered for duplicate detection

That led me to put the cover Title and Issue into Calibre's title block.
For Series, I use the Title-year (Analog-1972), Series index becomes the issue (or lowest month for Analog's Double Issue. Don't you love exceptions )
This allows a Search by Year that would not be east with the title field only.

Be aware that the Quality check plug-in will 'Find books with titles that have possible series info like hyphens/numerics '

[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.

[kiwidude]

At the risk of plugging my own plugin so to speak, I would suggest that the View Manager plugin can also offer a quick way to offer a different "view" of your library (and faster than switching libraries). Assign it to a hotkey and you could have a "Science Fiction" versus a "NonFiction" versus a "whatever" view which has different columns visible, search restrictions applied, sorting etc.

There are as well said by Jeannie genuine reasons at times for having different libraries for completely different purposes. But if someone's rationale for having a different library was "just" because they wanted some different columns visible isolating to a subset of their library there is now another option available to them.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by theducks

Your 'plan' needs to consider that the Title and Author will be considered for duplicate detection

No real need since the plan is to be able to exempt books as not duplicates. The first run might need some loving but after that the "not duplicate" books wouldn't show as possible duplicates.