popular magazines: a unique id and a means to get that data? ISSN is no help.

[anoukaimee]

I have a lot of periodicals (about 400, largely popular magazines) that I have downloaded as "packs": say, Family Handyman, 2016-2018. Typically, these items don't have issue number or month/date of publication appended in the metadata.

I was surprised to learn that ISSNs are not unique identifiers of issues, but rather just of a given series--they don't correspond to an issue, with date/volume number, but rather just the title as a whole. What makes them even less useful for my purposes is that it appears that they can change for a given title if, say, it is bought out by a new publisher. This makes it difficult to use them effectively to organize content, much less download covers, etc.

Is there some unique identifier of popular periodicals that indexes the individual issue rather than the series? Any way to download that? I know that scholarly articles are very well-indexed in this way, but short of looking to the homepage for a given magazine and hoping there is a publicly available index of titles (and there typically isn't), there is nothing short of going in to each of these issues in my PDF reader, putting it in a spreadsheet, and then manually updating the metadata. Right?

If it helps, to clarify my purpose: short of just my OCD desire for organization, I ultimately would like to add content to the metadata that is searchable, summarizing the contents of each issue. I have a lot of garden and DIY magazines that have projects/plans that could be useful, but can't readily identify which issue has what. What I have been doing up to now is looking at the cover and putting the "headlines" in the content of the "comments" field; I'm not sure if, beyond getting metadata, there might be a better way to organize these. If there are additional suggestions on this point, that'd be great.

Thanks for any help.

[BetterRed]

Assuming the PDFs have a text layer; why not just search the content as and when you're looking for something using something like Windows Search, MacOS Spotlight, or one of the Lucene based tools on Linux.

The "Drop Search Results (DSR)" plugin can be used to Mark the books most Windows search tools find in a calibre library, from there you could create a Reading List (another plugin), or tag the books.

Another alternative might be to use the Multicolumn search plugin, it claims to have full text search capabilities.

BR

[anoukaimee]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Assuming the PDFs have a text layer; why not just search the content as and when you're looking for something using something like Windows Search, MacOS Spotlight, or one of the Lucene based tools on Linux.

The "Drop Search Results (DSR)" plugin can be used to Mark the books most Windows search tools find in a calibre library, from there you could create a Reading List (another plugin), or tag the books.

Another alternative might be to use the Multicolumn search plugin, it claims to have full text search capabilities.

BR

Hmm; that's not a bad idea. I'm assuming a lot here--OCR--and it's still tough, but it's a good approach. It's time I tried out that multicolumn search thingy.

Thanks for your help!

[theducks]

You might also check out the Extract ISBN plugin (also only works on a text layer)

More tools are always handy to have.

[DaltonST]

ISSNs can be automatically extracted from PDFs with a text layer by the "Library Codes" plugin and added as a Calibre Identifier.

The ISSN can also be used to find a Library of Congress Code and/or Dewey Decimal Code.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...32&postcount=1


Added: the English Noun Frequency plugin is designed to give you sufficient information to figure out "at a glance" what a particular ebook is about. It will optionally update Tags and Tag-like custom columns with the N most frequent nouns, which can tell you a lot about a non-fiction book.


Added: Multi-Column Search (MCS) is used by Fan Fiction users to do full-text searches using regular expressions against .TXT formats of their ebooks, and then to apply other regular expressions to the previously found pieces of text to then update a custom column. This could be done to update a magazine's metadata if you had something regular to search for (e.g. ISBN or Issue Number) in a PDF that is first converted to plain TXT so it can be searched.


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[anoukaimee]

Originally Posted by DaltonST

ISSNs can be automatically extracted from PDFs with a text layer by the "Library Codes" plugin and added as a Calibre Identifier.




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That's great; the problem isn't Calibre (or the wonderful plugins therefor); it's with the ISSN system. How can librarians, of all people, NOT develop a system for a unique ID for every publication? Very surprised when I learned that they're not like ISBNs.

Thanks for the hint tho.