You should be able to do that by typing in the year as a negative number.ryanj1 wrote:A small box to affix "BC" or "AD" to publication dates would be very useful. They might also be utilized as search criteria
-- 09 Feb 2015 12:57 pm --
Okay, I will make a tool to list all of one's own books that do not have genre and/or release date so that the member can add that data all on one page.gali wrote:When I use the "mass add", I add books by the same genre.Scott wrote:-- 08 Feb 2015 02:58 pm --
Well do you usually find you already have the books sorted by genre before you submit them, such that you want to choose a genre and 'mass add' a bunch of books only from that genre? Or are you looking to add them one-by-one but on a single screen If the latter, what might be even more helpful than changing the mass-adder would be to create a new page for mass-adding genres to books. I am thinking of a page that would on one single page list all the books from one's own shelves that do not have a genre with a selection box to select the genre for each and then submit the form. In fact, the same thing could be done with release year.
This re-raises the issue of whether or not there is other important meta-data besides genre and release date that rather than having to navigate to each book's page?
members might like included not only on the individual pages for books but also for sorting and searching purposes. Adding in any other meta data if desired now would ensure it is properly included in these other new tools.
I like your second idea, adding books one-by-one on a single screen rather than having to navigate to each book's page.
It will make it easier to add many books at once and less tiresome.
I will do this tool separately from the mass adder if that is okay. I am not completely sure how meta-data like genre and release year will work in the future so it could over complicate the mass adder. We previously discussed the idea of adding a tagging mechanism of some sort. That might integrate better with the mass adder in that one could tag the whole list.
I am working on making pages for all the different member-submitted authors right now. So I may not get to the genre-adding tool until tomorrow or so.
Might I also take this time to say I am so impressed by what has been done with Bookshelves, not by me but by the members. It's starting to grow into a really awesome member-created resource. We already have thousands of member-submitted books, and and then those books have member-submitted data like cover, original release date, genre. This means we have a unique resource that doesn't exist elsewhere. The closest things are automated book data tools based on ISBN number. The biggest problem with those is that each different edition of a book gets a different ISBN. So for instance if you plug in the ISBN for a recent paperback of Animal Farm and it might make it seem like Orwell wrote it in 2014!