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!