23 MS-Windows ® based cataloguing – HomeBase ® at the home base!

It would be nice if they could develop a basic program that has Lotus Agenda’s unique approach and capability (see previous post) of assigning items to categories based on text matching, as this is what automated classification is about. Until then, one has to fall back upon other database programs available for inventory management. One such, especially suitable for home libraries, is a simple and effective program called HomeBase, which is available free from AbeBooks at abebooks.com (American Book Exchange, if I am not mistaken). It is actually meant to make your book catalogue available to prospective customers on the AbeBooks site (for a payment); but we can use it in the meanwhile to develop our own stand-alone catalogues. In doing so, we may have to find certain work-arounds to emulate Agenda’s sorely-missed capabilities.

HomeBase (now in version 3) has fields for most of the details one would like to enter for a book, and then some. Being a database for book sellers and collectors, it has fields for binding, type of edition, condition of the book, size, and so on. Many of the fields are sortable, in the sense that the display or list View can be rearranged alphabetically in ascending or descending order according to Author’s name, or Title, or Publisher, to name a few possibilities. It also has fields for keywords, comment/description, and private notes, ISBN, etc., but since it’s obviously not geared to the classified library, it does not have a field specifically for the Dewey classification code or call number /shelf number. An obvious choice to enter the DDC number would be the Keywords field, and that is what I do, but it’s unfortunately not one of the sortable fields. Since the catalogue needs to be arranged by the DDC number (apart from the Author name), I suggest using one of the available fields for this; I am presently experimenting with Illustrator, which is a sortable field: you can display the list in the order of the DC numbers on this field with a key stroke; the Description/Comment and Keyword fields do not have this capability, which makes them less useful if you wish to arrange the books by Subject or Class Number. If there are a lot of books under each  subject or class number, it would obviously be good to put the full Shelf No in the DDC field (DDC number, three letters from Author name, year), so that the books can be arranged in the same specific order on the shelf as well as in the database view.

The plus point is that books can be picked up based on text searches in the Keyword and Description/Comments fields (and also based on Book Number, Title, Author/Illustrator, Publisher, ISBN, and Status fields); this means that you can get the program to list the books having a certain text string in any of these fields (termed a Filter), say ‘Wildlife’, and then sort them by Author or Year and so on. Incidentally, there is also a long list of category names already built in, so you could use these instead of the Dewey subject headings. Or you could add your own categories (up to a limit, I think it is 100).

All this is not as versatile as Lotus Agenda, where you could type any text desired  in the main Item field, and Agenda would automatically make assignments of the Item to different (pre-existing) categories based on text matches. In HomeBase, I don’t think there is a facility to save specific queries as Views (which is another of Agenda’s delightful features), one has to ask it to pick out items matching your criteria, and then work from there. But there is another facility in HomeBase that should be useful: you can assign each item to different Catalogues. One use may be to put in DDC Classes here; there is of course a limit to the number of catalogues, something like 100 I think. The idea would be, I suppose, to have a limited number of Catalogue names that could broadly follow the DDC Hundreds (with a few selected sub-disciplines to reflect the local interests, if there were a large number of specialized books). If the file starts getting too big, for instance, one may think of hiving off portions of it, say all Humanities (000-499) in one Catalogue, Science & Technology in another (500-699), and so on.

Another potentially useful feature in HomeBase is that it will locate the book in its own database and fill in all the fields if you give it some information like the international standard book number (ISBN). That requires you to register as a seller, however, which starts at 25 $ a month for 500 books (apart from a commission on sales), so you had better be a serious vendor with a good inventory and be prepared to work hard in case you want to recover your money! I guess eBay is a little easier to start as a small or occasional seller, as it allows you to list up to 50 items free and charges a 10% commission only on sales.

Disclosure: I’ve only played around with HomeBase, and not actually gotten down to filling in the database records for either my books or my music albums. I think that necessity will arise only if I intend to sell (and that too, through AbeBooks). I’m not very sure that it will be worth the effort at present to fill in all the books, merely to be able to search and locate automatically… my collection is not that big that books get completely lost sight of if they are misplaced on the shelves!

22 Building catalogues with a Personal Information Manager (PIM) - Lotus Agenda ® for MS-DOS ® !

Have computer, will database. Obviously, a book catalogue is a prime candidate for computerisation. Funnily enough, one of the greatest software programs I have ever used for this type of application, is an old MS-DOS package by Lotus Corporation called Lotus Agenda. Here’s what Underdogs has to say about this program on the site http://www.hotud.org/component/content/article/40-application/23496

“Lotus Agenda is arguably not only the best "personal information manager" (PIM) software ever made, but also one of the best applications ever seen on a PC. A DOS program originally marketed by Lotus during the late 1980's and early 1990's, Lotus Agenda is in fact the program for which the term PIM was coined. Even to this day, it has PIM capabilities and features that are unmatched by any other software available.

"Until recently Agenda was the only PIM in the market that allows the keying of data to precede the creation of database tables. It is an immensely useful tool for sorting piles of information into meaningful categories.” 

The great thing about Lotus Agenda is the capability of searching out matches and making allotments to categories automatically based on these text matches. In specific terms, this can be used to assign each book to its subject classifications (which can be more than one), based on text matches – words or parts of words. All other programs I have tried require you to make assignments manually – this job may be marginally speeded up by drop down lists of categories or by autocompletion of the entry based on your initial key strokes, but you would still have to look at the list of categories (say, Dewey numbers) and choose the appropriate entries manually. What Lotus Agenda does is to parse through the description (your main item entry), and match it with the words in its list of categories , and automatically make assignments (which you could overrule manually if required). Another, probably unappreciated, and unexpected, advantage of this is that each item can have a different number of assignments. In a usual database program, it is generally required to specify a fixed set of entries under each category. For instance, we would need to specify Author1, Author2, and Author3, in the design stage of the database. Similarly, Subject1, Subject2, Subject3 and so on, but a definite fixed number. Now if a particular item had say four authors, we would be stuck. These traditional databases are fixed in their structure. Lotus Agenda, on the other hand, can have a different number of assignments under each head, for each item.

Of course, we would have to provide the master list of categories (and sub-categories too, nested a few levels). Each file can get to 5.5 megabytes (MB) according to the Help pages, and you would have to split the file beyond this size. I used it for a collection of 2000 items with close on a 100 categories (average 25 categories assigned to each item!) and the file size hardly came to 2 MB. This is suitable for the simplified Dewey classification, but because very big file sizes generally increase errors in processing (the file will come out “corrupted” sometimes, and we will have to reload the older file), I have generally split up the catalogue by broad areas of knowledge, e.g. each 100’s gets its own database file. 

The advantage of multiple assignments is that a book can be classified in many ways. A book on wildlife conservation could thus be automatically classified under Wildlife management in 639.9, and simultaneously also under other subject categories (DDC subject codes) like Conservation of Biological Resources 333.9, Animals/Zoology  591, Ecology 574.5, etc. The pre-condition for this to happen automatically would be either that we enter the numbers in the description itself, or that the category names each should have the keywords of the item description (Title of the book, etc.) already entered in its definition. The flexibility afforded is that keywords can be added to the definition at any time if some new text items crop up as the books are entered. . It is doubtful whether a single file could handle the entire DDC subject categories as well as the Tables for Place, etc. I guess what one should be doing is to add subject headings and place names as one goes along, which will help to keep file sizes down, and not really try to pre-enter the entire DC subject lists.

The disadvantage – and a crushing one, I’m afraid – is that Agenda was only made for DOS, and never ported to Windows. There are groups that discuss these things on the Internet, and they used to suggest that an Open Source project was under way led by Mitch Kapor, one of the original team that developed Agenda for Lotus. Unfortunately it appears that they were interested in certain other capabilities, especially web-based information tracking and team-based processing (emails, contacts, calendars  and the like), and it seemed to have resulted in ‘bloatware’ that doesn’t do the intelligent Personal Information Management (PIM) that a single user needs.

One good thing that Lotus has done is to provide much of the old software as freeware. The official download page for Agenda (from the above blog, dated March 2009) is http://www2.support.lotus.com/ftp/pub/desktop/Agenda/dos/2.0/misc/

The site provides the individual installation disks as a file image, a throwback to the 3.5 inch microdiskettes on which they used to come (each had a 1.4 MB capacity!).

One really wishes there were an alternative ‘free-form’ database package where one could change the structure, add fields, have variable number of fields for each item (record), and have the software intelligently parse the text and make matches on the run, but there doesn’t seem to be any for Windows. A German product called InfoHandler seems to have made the effort, but I could never understand the logic of their system and gave up. The one practical option seems to me to be ABE (American Book Exchange) HomeBase, which they provide free of charge here http://www.abebooks.com/homebase/software-inventory-management-system-catalog/?cm_sp=Ftr-_-Home-_-C2

I preferred v.2.x, as v.3 which they have now has very tiny typefaces! One advantage if you pay the membership is that the program can fill all the fields from its international database if you give the basic information. You could also be a seller on AbeBooks.com if you pay the fees. More on AbeBooks HomeBase in the next post! 

Abundant disclosure: I used Agenda mainly for my music collection, and only experimented with it for the Dewey classification. Which eminds me, I really must port the music data into HomeBase... but I will have to make assignments to the categories manually!