Tellico 1.3.3, the "Angels Gate Proposal" release, is available from the download list. Just a few changes since the last release.

• Fixed bug with file catalogs to properly match on file location
• Changed Arxiv fetcher to remove ID version number from results
• Updated drag-and-drop to allow HTTP urls, i.e. dragging bibtex file from browser
• Updated Porbase in z39.50 server list
• Fixed copy() for text selection in main entry view

Last night, I finally got the KDE4 port of Tellico to compile and run. There are a few things that have been disabled until I figure out the KDE4 equivalents, but the last couple of months work has paid off. Like most everyone else who ported their application, the first run basically shows misplaced menus, icons, overlapping text, etc. But here it is...

It runs very slowly so I suspect I have a bad loop somewhere, or a hung job, or something. But at least, it's a start. I can actually test-run it and figure out what's going on.

Developing on it has been different since I can't figure out how to get KDevelop3 to do what I want in the KDE4 build approach (separate build-dir, using cmake, etc.). Mostly, it's been kate.

The work is going on in the Tellico SVN trunk.

As noticed on iLibrarian, Tellico was listed by Job Profiles (whatever that is) as an awesome open source resource for online writers

Tellico is a program that works to help you manage a collection, whether it's of your short stories or of your favorite novels. It can help you keep track of anything writing related that requires database maintenance.

If you've run into a Tellico problem lately where most of the entry data doesn't show up in the view, it's due to the fact that you upgraded to libxslt 1.1.23. I was able to figure out that the issue is in the XSL templates but I can't figure out if it's a Tellico bug or an libxslt regression.

I can certainly work around the issue, and in fact, it's probably best if I do. I'll have updated templates in the next Tellico release. But I haven't actually filed a bug report yet, since I'm trying to find other examples of this usage pattern.

UPDATE: looks like it's RedHat bug 442097, and the libxslt code change has been reverted in Fedora RPMs.

UPDATE2: I filed GNOME bug 531873

UPDATE3: It's been fixed in libxslt SVN and 1.1.24 will be out soon.

Wow, Tellico got mentioned in the Manila Standard Today, in the Philippines. Chin Wong wrote the article.

Remarkably, I stumbled upon Tellico, a program that met all these requirements and then some, after six months of on-and-off searching.

Developed by Robby Stephenson as a hobby, Tellico is described as a collection manager for KDE, a common desktop environment for Linux. Ubuntu Linux uses the Gnome desktop, but can install and run KDE applications with no problem. To install Tellico, simply choose it in the Synaptic Package Manager.

I don't think Tellico has ever been mentioned in a newspaper before. This is a milestone!

The May 2008 issue of Linux User has a review of Tellico (in German). From the google translation, everything appears to be pretty positive. They've run reviews twice before, once in 2006 and once in 2005.

Die Datenbankverwaltung Tellico präsentiert sich als solider Archivar für alle denkbaren Zwecke. Die durchdacht aufgebauten Vorlagen erleichtern den schnellen Einstieg in die Software erheblich. Das Erstellen eigener Datenmasken erweist sich als unkompliziert und darf sich zurecht äußerst benutzerfreundlich nennen.

Peter Fink let me know about a Tellico review in the German magazine, c't and was even kind enough to send me a PDF scan.

Für alle, die eine Sammlung unter Linux katalogisieren und verwalten wollen, ist Tellico das Werkzeug der Wahl. Das KDE-Programm bringt diverse Vorlagen, unter anderem für Bücher, Münzen, Briefmarken, CDs und Wein mit, die man nur noch mit den Daten seiner Sammlung füllen muss. Darüber hinaus lassen sich eigene Vorlagen mit beliebig vielen Feldern definieren.

Thomas Klausner let me know that Tellico has been added to the NetBSD pkgsrc repository. He's provided me with some feedback on a couple of bugs I need to fix, too. I appreciate that.

The tellico-users mailing list seems to be down again. This is possibly related to Novell bug 89, which I closed last week because I could again successfully moderate the mailman queue, but now, none of my test emails are going through at all and I've had a few direct emails from people asking what the problem is.

The weird thing is that I still see moderated messages in the queue. But no messages from list members are getting through apparently.

Sadly, there's not a lot of support on Novell Forge these days.

Update: it's been transferred into Novell Bug 378724, and it turns out to be a mailman bug. Looks like we might get a fix in the next day or so.

Just came across StuffKeeper.

Stuffkeeper is a generic catalog program. It is not focused on a particular type,  like incollector focuses on notes,logs, chat's etc, or cdcollector on cd's, it can hold any type of data.There are programs that can do this, like tellico, but it opens new db for every type. StuffKeeper tries to provide one program, with one view that can show any type of data, in a easy to use and good looking interface.

Linux.com reviews Referencer

Despite its simplicity, Referencer is a useful application that can help you to kill two birds with one stone. You can use the application to organize your documents into easy-to-manage searchable libraries. And the ability to retrieve and manage metadata combined with the ability to handle bibliography files makes Referencer a great tool for researchers and writers alike.

My Ubuntu Blog reviews video collection managers, including Tellico.

Definitely Tellico wins with a clear margin for its intutive approach to manage, display, import, export, search, retrieve and manipulate data.

Tellico can import metadata about a CD by generating a disc profile and querying a CDDB server. To do this, it uses KDE's KCDDB library. Unfortunately, using this library appears to be a rare thing. In fact, Tellico is the only app in Fedora to link against libkcddb.so.

OpenSUSE thinks you shouldn't be able to edit or even see your CDDB settings. Check out the ping-pong in bug 254175. Simply insane. When NoDisplay=true is set, then you can't even run

kcmshell libkcddb

So since I'll probably forget this in the future, and SuSE will push an update that overwrites my setting, I'm bloggin about it. First, edit /opt/kde3/share/applications/kde/libkcddb.desktop to fix the NoDisplay setting. Then rerun kbuildsycoca.

Amazon.com is shutting down their E-Commerce Web Service 3.0 webservice, as of March 31. ECS3 has been deprecated in favor of Amazon Associates Web Service 4.0. Yeah, there's some marketing speak in there, but basically, they had an older version of their webservice still available, and it's going away now.

How is Tellico affected? I made the switch to what was then called ECS4 in November 2005 and have continued to update the API as additional features have been added. The first released version of Tellico with that access was version 1.1, in February 2006.

Amazon has been sending me emails about Tellico's token still being used with the ECS3 service, so I know there are people out there with versions prior to 1.1 who are using Amazon's search. After March 31, those data sources won't work. Just so you know. (The app will work, you just won't be able to search Amazon.) Upgrade!

Tellico 1.3.1 (the "More Orange on my Calendar" release) is available. Grab it from the download page.

The list of updates, bug-fixes, and additions includes:

• Added data source for discogs.com, a database for musical albums, including vinyl
• Added data source for Google Scholar
• Added LCCN search to z39.50 and SRU sources
• Added DOI search to Pubmed source
• Updated CrossRef source to use new unixref format for more data
• Improved loading performance to delay loading linked images as long as possible
• Updated Delicious Library importer to look for cover images
• Updated BoardGameGeek source to grab cover image, patch from Sven Werlen
• Fixed bug that prevented bibtex from working for external application sources
• Changed "ISBN not found" dialog to only appear when searching for multiple values
• Fixed bug with SRU format not getting remembered in config dialog
• Fixed bug with entries with multiple titles not getting linked correctly in HTML export
• Fixed bug with some free-form date fields getting formatted incorectly into empty strings
• Fixed bibtex import for keywords field

I came across gPapers this weekend, which is a relatively new application that bills itself as "iTunes for PDFs". It looks pretty good, with lots of features.

It uses pyGtk, so it's another scripted app, no compilation needed. It has separate lists for authors, organization, etc. as iTunes does for artists and albums. It does a pretty good job of searching online databases, and reading PDF files.

Being a new app, and having a few unusual library dependencies, you probably won't find it in your distribution's repository. So if you want to give gPapers a shot, you'll have to download and run it using the source.

CrossRef.org recently improved their OpenURL metadata search to return additional data in their Unified CrossRef XML format. Tellico uses CrossRef for DOI lookup, so I wrote up the new XSL stylesheet this afternoon to take advantage of the additional data.

Chuck Koscher mentioned it on the CrossRef blog and Alf Eaton picked it up on HubLog.

Casey Durfee, who works over at LibraryThing, posted about the Library of Congress' new agreement with Microsoft. He makes several good points about vendor lock-in, and the availability of publicly-funded data.

Most disturbingly, users are locked in, too: anybody using an iPhone, an old version of Windows, any version of Linux, or any other operating system or device not supported by Silverlight will be unable to use the Library of Congress' new website. How is that compatible with the principles of democracy or librarianship? It's taxation without web presentation. And how exactly is that a quantum leap forward? (If the LOC really wanted to make a quantum leap, it would open up its data.)

No kidding! There are plenty of ways to add whiz-bang to websites, without sacrificing accessibility (in both the OS and the disabilities sense). Silverlight won't run on Linux, simple as that, no matter how much Microsoft touts it as a "cross-platform" plug-in. Shame on the LIbrary of Congress.

Aleksandar Urosevic emailed me to let me know that he has a review of Tellico published in a popular Serbian IT magazine, Svet kompjutera. It's also just been published online. Thought I can't read more than two words of it, it looks pretty great!

Najbolje od svega je to što ćete imati brzo dostupne sve potrebne informacije o svojoj kolekciji u trenutku kada vam zatrebaju. Tellico nudi još neke korisne opcije, ali ćemo se na ovome zaustaviti i pustiti vas da ga isprobate i sami otkrijete sve čari koje ovaj sjajni program pruža.

LifeHacker picked up the Linux.com story and added their own recommendation.

Tellico, a free, open source collection manager available in many Linux repositories, isn't the only database-style organization tool on the block—especially with the recent explosion of web apps. What makes Tellico totally recommendable is its portability and complete . Sure, there are presets for a wealth of collections—books, DVDs, wine, coins, and the like—but you can put in and take out the labels you really care about. And unlike most programs of its kind, Tellico stores its collection files in XML format instead of SQL databases, making it easy to export your data and visualize it, amongst other perks.

Zotero is cool software, if only for the fact that it gives people a reason to post photos like this on their blogs...

GTD Kitteh! by Karin Dalziel. License:

Yes, I’m a research dork. So sue me. And in the meantime, if you’re doing serious research, go forth and play with Zotero.

Linux.com has a nice review of Tellico that just got posted. Shashank Sharma writes

Most of the collection managers I've come across are highly specialized for one particular collection. Tellico stand out because it can be used to record various types of collections. With the varied collection fields for each of the collections it supports, it ensures each item is carefully cataloged. To top it all of, its Internet search feature makes adding new entries a breeze and gives Tellico a distinct edge over other similar tools.

Tellico was also mentioned in another Linux.com article about Alexandria. Alexandria just had a recent release of version 0.6.2. The new development activity is great to see. Tellico was briefly mentioned, as well, in another review for Alexandria written by Jonathan DePrizio.

Patrick Guignot wrote up a very comprehensive announcement of the 1.3 release. He pulled information from my blog posts, the documentation, and the Tellico email list to mention just about everything currently relevant about SQL, KDE4, GCstar, etc. It's in French, so enjoy!

Il [Tellico] permet de gérer facilement toutes sortes de collections et d'importer des informations depuis divers sites Internet afin de remplir automatiquement les champs de ces collections. Du fait de ses très nombreuses fonctions, de la réactivité de son développeur et de son manuel d'utilisation complet, Tellico est devenu une sorte de référence dans son genre au sein du monde du logiciel libre et même au-delà.

Regis had also written an update about the 1.3 pre-releases.

Tellico 1.3 is already in Debian unstable, Ubuntu Hardy, and Fedora Rawhide.

Tellico 1.3 (the "Jane Austen" edition) is available. Grab it from the download page.

At one point, I thought that the next major release I made would be version 2.0, with a SQL backend or something. But that turned out to be hard, so this has some incremental stuff. I might end up porting to KDE4 before going to a different backend, too, just depends on how I feel about things. Thus is open source! :)

Updates include:

• Added board game collection, and data source for BoardGameGeek, using patch from Steve Beattie (requires ruby).
• Added data source for using any GCstar plugin
• Added importers for Griffith, Referencer and Delicious Library
• Added importer for PDF files, using the exempi and poppler libraries (optional)
• Added drag & drop for importing PDF, bibtex, and RIS files
• Added DOI field and searching crossref.org, citebase.org, Bibsonomy, and arxiv.org
• Added command for merging multiple entries, based on a patch from Cyril Dangerville
• Updated CSV importer, IMDb fetcher, and Spanish Ministry of Culture script
• Added option to save image files in a local directory relative to data file
• Added option to save a link to an image file instead of copying it
• Extended the DCOP interface to allow more scripting, including adding and modifying entries
• Experimental barcode scanning with a webcam (use --enable-webcam for the configure script). See Sebastian's website about his patch for more details.
• Added Ukrainian translation, from Serhij Dubyk

Please send all bug reports, comments, etc. to the Tellico mailing list.

It appears that someone added Tellico to the KDE TechBase KDE4 Porting Status page, linking to an email I wrote about not starting the port yet.

Tellico 1.3 will be available shortly, and everything in the 1.3 branch will stay with KDE 3.x, obviously. Regis has been working on some initial porting in another branch and he's made some real progress. With the current excitement about KDE4, it'd be fun to move over to porting and working with KDE4, I think. So maybe Tellico 2.0 will be the port. Qt4 has some better SQL integration, so maybe changing the backend will be easier.

I've also been thinking about requesting that Tellico move into the KDE SVN repo. It would go into one of the extragear modules, I think. Doing that would gain exposure, translation, and coding help (presumably). I'd be giving up lots of control, obviously, but that doesn't really bother me as much anymore. Stay tuned...

Apparently, the UTF-8 support in libyaz and Tellico is not only good for Hebrew, it works for Korean, too!

KDE의 컬렉션 관리 도구. 책과 참고문헌 목록을 관리할 수 있다. BibTeX 또는 BibTeXml 형식을 읽을 수 있고 내보낼 수도 있다. z39.50 프로토콜을 통해 국립중앙도서관, 국회도서관 자료를 프로그램 내에서 검색하고 결과를 목록에 추가할 수있다. 책과 참고문헌 외에 비디오, 음악, 게임, 동전, 우표, 등의 수집 관리를 기본으로 제공하고 자유롭게 새로운 데이터베이스도 만들 수있다.

The page has information for a Korean z39.50 source at korcis-net.nl.kr.

I just want to say that I really appreciate the work that folks contribute in package and translating Tellico. Tellico is part of several distributions at this point, and seems to have gained some small following, and it would not be out there and available were it not due to it being packaged and translated. And there are many folks who have put some real effort into that.

I came across a mention of Tellico in an Ulteo review. Ulteo is a new type of Linux distribution from Gaël Duval, originally from Madrake/Mandriva. From the website, it appears that it's still in beta, so I couldn't try it out yet. We'll see.

Having Tellico included makes me proud!

Update2: There was a bug that would edit multiple entries at once, when only one was selected. Fixed in pre3

Update: I messed up the packaging, so there's a 1.3pre2 tarball available now that should have all the files in it.

I've got a new version of Tellico available, the first pre-release version of 1.3. Download it from here.

At one point, I thought that the next major release I made would be version 2.0, with a SQL backend or something. But that turned out to be hard, so this has some incremental stuff. I might end up porting to KDE4 (out today!) before going to a different backend, too, just depends on how I feel about things. Thus is open source! :)

I still need to update the documentation and clean up a few things. There shouldn't be any new strings after this, so if you want to update translations and send them to me, that'd be great!

Updates include:

• Added board game collection, and data source for BoardGameGeek, using patch from Steve Beattie (requires ruby).
• Added data source for using any GCstar plugin
• Added importers for Griffith, Referencer and Delicious Library
• Added importer for PDF files, using the exempi and poppler libraries (optional)
• Added drag & drop for importing PDF, bibtex, and RIS files
• Added DOI field and searching crossref.org, citebase.org, Bibsonomy, and arxiv.org
• Added command for merging multiple entries, based on a patch from Cyril Dangerville
• Updated CSV importer, IMDb fetcher, and Spanish Ministry of Culture script
• Added option to save image files in a local directory relative to data file
• Added option to save a link to an image file instead of copying it
• Extended the DCOP interface to allow more scripting, including adding and modifying entries
• Experimental barcode scanning with a webcam (use --enable-webcam for the configure script). See Sebastian's website about his patch for more details.
• Added Ukrainian translation, from Serhij Dubyk Сергій Дубик

Please, backup your data files. Export to Zip and archive them or something. I use Tellico myself, almost daily, and everything seems ok, but you never can tell.

The Bibsonomy folks threw up a quick note about character encoding with respect to Bibtex files. There's some good basic information there, and I'm going to bookmark it so I can point people to it later. I get frequenct emails about importing Bibtex files into Tellico.

Alf Eaton just posted a cool article about screen-scraping with Javascript that puts together some building blocks from Zotero, amazon, and others to completely parse and output some bibliographic data.

The point of this is to try and make Javascript scrapers that will run in Firefox (for Zotero), WebKit (for BibDesk and Papers) and Rhino (server-side, for Connotea, CiteULike, Bibsonomy, etc).

Sounds pretty cool. Of course, WebKit is a fork of KHTML, which is what Tellico uses for a HTML viewer. I've not doubt I could cobble up something using Alf's work, similar to the new browser in BibDesk, that might let me browse and pull bibliographic data right into Tellico...

Somewhere along the line a while ago, the Yahoo! Audio Search stopped working. The API examples wouldn't return anything. There were several emails to the mailing list about it, but nothing seemed to happen, so I gave up.

That's probably why using Tellico to search for "The Beatles" didn't work for Richard Crawley.

Well, I was trying to figure out if I wanted to remove that data source from Tellico, or at least, add a warning about it not working. But, it appears to be working again! Except, there's way too much junk for a search on "The Beatles" to actually be of very much use. :P

I've added drag & drop support for Tellico in the current 1.3 branch and SVN trunk. What that means is that you should be able to drag a bibtex file, or any other type of file that Tellico supports, into the main Tellico window, and have that file imported. There are still a few rough edges, notably what to do when multiple files are dropped, but the framework is there.

Also, I've implemented an importer for PDF files. If available at compilation time, Tellico will link to the Exempi and Poppler libraries for reading PDF metadata (XMP, if you will). If your PDF file has metadate such as title and author, then Tellico should read it. So now you can drag a PDF file into Tellico, and have it be imported as a new Bibliography entry.

Exempi and Poppler are optional build dependencies, by the way. They are not required.

There will probably be a version 1.3 release, which does not use a SQL backend. I just haven't gotten SQL working yet, it's as simple as that. And there are some itches I'd like to scratch now instead of waiting. Some of them are involved with better bibliographic support, and reading PDF files is one item on that list. Another is supporting DOI identifiers. I hope to have time to work on that this coming weekend.

I just updated my workstation to openSuse 10.3. I also check around at some of the announcements, and a few of them even mention Tellico!

Office Software

• OpenOffice.org 2.3
• Desktop search Beagle 0.2.17
• Catalogue database: Tellico 1.2.13
• Personal information manager: Evolution 2.11.5, Kontact 3.92
• wine 0.9.42

http://www.edv-buchversand.de

I just registered Tellicoon CIA.vc, with statistics available at http://cia.vc/stats/project/tellico. I think I got the SVN info submitted correctly, so we'll see if the repository information starts showing up.

Tellico 1.2.14 is available. I've accumulated several miscellaneous patches over the last two months, so there's quite a bit in the change log.

• Improved entry updating to work with all collection types.
• Added MARCXML to allowed SRU search formats.
• Fixed bug with MARC stylesheets to work better with embedded XML records.
• Fixed bug with z39.50 search that hid some results.
• Updated JavaScript and CSS in HTML export.
• Updated isbndb.com search, also allows comic book searches.
• Updated Amazon.com search to allow comic books.
• Updated GCstar importer for new GCstar document format.
• Updated allocine.fr script to version 0.4, from Mathias Monnerville.
• Updated Spanish Ministry of Culture search script, patch from Leopold Palomo Avellaneda.
• Fixed problem with settings not being saved on Fedora.

I wrote a quick python script to export a Griffith database to Tellico format. It builds off of Mathias Monnerville's basic framework and grabs most of the Griffith fields that have comparable items in Tellico's movie collection template.

Download the script. Make sure it is executable. If you have python installed in a weird place, or if Griffith is storing its database file in a weird place, you may need to edit the first few lines in the script. Then run:

% ./griffith2tellico.py > griffith.tc

Load or import the griffith.tc file.

The export of the actors and actresses may not work depending on how you have them formatted. Griffith doesn't enforce any sort of format - it's a free-form field as far as I can tell.

My python expertise is still at a novice level, so don't pick at it too much. The script is rather fragile, I'm sure. It requires pysqlite3, but I don't know if that's part of a standard python installation or not.

Sebastian Held emailed the tellico-users group about some code he wrote to use his webcam to scan barcodes and feed them into Tellico. It looks very impressive.

Basically, he has a script that captures frame from the webcam using mplayer, sends them to BaToo, a barcode recognition package, then passes the resulting ISBN value to Tellico using DCOP. He uses DCOP in ways I didn't even know was possible, showing a dialog, editing a specific widget, clicking a button.

Webcam integration is one of the most-heralded features of Delicious Library, and several other collection management software package provide it as well. BaToo is written in Java, and Sebastian has some helper classes around that. Getting it integrated into Tellico would be a big job, but wow, what a cool thing to have! I may start playing with it some, though I don't have a webcam.

I created a test partition on my home machine and installed Fedora 7, which, by the way, is pretty slick, though for some it won't boot directly into X, it goes to runlevel 3. I don't know what I did to make that the default, but I must have done something since I can't imagine Fedora not behaving sanely. Anyways, the problem that Tellico is having with the setting being overwritten turns out to be an issue with the way I'm (ab)using some config settings that come out of the Kiosk framework. It appears that if you set them in the local config file, then it gets ignored and overwritten with the software defaults. I don't know why it does that, I couldn't find the KDE code that did it, and I don't know why it only showed up on Fedora.

The easy work-around is just to not use those settings. I'm probably being too paranoid about them anyway. But, the better fix is to install a global config file for Tellico with them, and don't set them in the application constructor. I checked in that fix and it'll be in the next release.

Fedora Tellico users all over the world rejoice! :P

For whatever reason, it appears that Tellico is unable to store configuration settings when running on Fedora 7. The tellicorc file is overwritten every time the application is run. Several users have reported the problem. However, I don't use Fedora and don't have access to a Fedora installation to figure out why Tellico is misbehaving.

I've been unable to find a bug report about any similar issue for other KDE apps. That suggests that the problem is due to something in the way that Tellico uses KConfig. But I can't figure out what in the world that might be.

This is just a post to raise awareness, in a sense, and perhaps someone will see it and have a suggestion. The only workaround was suggested by Vitor Pereira and involves explicitly setting the location of the tellicorc file.

The European Library has an SRU interface, it's just a bit hard to find. Tellico can use it, though the data is a bit sparse.

Host

www.theeuropeanlibrary.org

Port

80

Path

/sru/sru.pl

Format

Dublin Core (although MODS seems to work, too)

It doesn't seem to support ISBN searches. And the default Tellico search must be interacting strangely with their collection index. Test searches such as "Harry Potter" don't return anything like I would expect.

I came across a blog post today about a new release of tablesorter, a plugin written for jQuery. tablesorter uses JavaScript to dynamically sort tables in HTML.

Since Tellico's HTML uses JS for table sorting as well, I figured I'd try this new code out. And it's pretty fast. Granted, the jQuery code allows you to do all sorts of things, and sorting tables is just the tip of the iceberg. But it was interesting and fun to play with it. In the process, I decided to update some of the code used for table sorting.

If you want to check it out, here are three examples:

• Current Tellico Export
• Updated Tellico Export
• Tellico Export using jQuery and tablesorter

Now, I used one of Christian Bach's CSS themes for the jQuery page, so it has a different font, color, etc. But you can click the header in any of those three files to sort the table. I haven't actually done any benchmarking, though. That would be an obvious thing to do. It was a fun little activity for the evening and helped me relieve some stress...

I came across another book/DVD collection manager for Windows, called Libra. I haven't actually run it, since I don't have Windows at home, but I did notice that they're using the Tellico icon! Prominently, too, on both the website and in the application itself.

Virginie Quesnay created the icon back in 2004. It's licensed under the LGPL.

The review of Tellico that got published in Dragonia magazine has been translated to English and republished on polishlinux.org.

My favorite quote from the review is Definitely the strong side of Tellico is understanding the needs of its users. That makes me happy. I try.

Tellico 1.2.13 is available. The changelog is as follows:

• Fixed crashing bug when modifying fields for a collection with loans.
• Fixed bug with namespace handling for loading Tellico XML files.
• Added spell-checking for text fields.
• Added importer for GCstar data files.
• Added compatibility with yaz3.
• Added Copac and National Library of Lithuania to z39.50 server list.

The namespace bug doesn't seem to have bitten anyone yet that I've heard of. I discovered it when writing the gcstar2tellico.xsl file. The data loader was using QDom's namespace methods in some places and not in others, so it was inconsistent.

The GCstar importer is basically an update to the old GCfilms updater. It will still handle the older files, if anyone needs that. The importer currently handles books, movies, music, wines, coins, and video games. It does not handle GCstar's custom collections yet.

So The Open Library is up and going, and they have a demo site available to try out. This is pretty cool stuff.

But most importantly, such a library must be fully open. Not simply "free to the people," as the grand banner across the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh proclaims, but a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. In an era where library data and Internet databases are being run by money-seeking companies behind closed doors, it's more important than ever to be open.

About Open Library

How about their Open Library Number concept! Something akin to an ISBN, but not just for recently published books, every single book ever written! That's pretty cool.

Obviously, at some point, I'd love to figure out a way to have Tellico interface to the database, either merely by pulling data, or actually submitting or modifying it as well. But that's certainly way in the future. I'm just pretty astonished at what the people involved with the Open Library have been able to do so far.

I've been looking at designing a database schema for Tellico v2 and have had a couple of different approaches so far. The ThingDB schema used by the Open Library seems rather interesting. I wonder how well it will mesh with the FRBR approach.

It's worth saying that Time Spalding at Library Thing is excited. He's been a big proponent of book cataloging as a social activity for a while now. I suppose it's also much like WorldCat, but is obviously designed to be much more free and open with its data and API.

Here's hoping they really get this off the ground. You should help!

I meant to blog about this earlier. The Copac database, the UK & Irish National Union Catalogue, has recently updated their database to offer results in the MODS format. As a result, you can now use it as a z39.50 resource in Tellico. I'll probably add it to the list of presets, as well.

Jérôme Rapinat recently contacted me about using GRAMPS with Tellico. GRAMPS is a genealogy program, and a very capable one at that. Tellico's XSL import and export is capable of working with GRAMPS XML files directly.

I'm not quite sure what Jérôme may be doing with the capability, but perhaps Tellico offers a different way of looking at the data that is interesting.

Tellico 1.2.12 is available, with a slew of bug fixes. Plus, a new translation, Turkish, has been added, bringing the total of languages with 70% translation to 15.

Changelog:

• Fixed potential recursion bug for dependent fields.
• Fixed bug that didn't write image size options when printing.
• Added Turkish translation, thanks to Ali Isingor and Kunter Kutlu.
• Added '\%' to bibtex translation table for comment escaping.
• Bumped automake requirement to version 1.8 or later for macro to work.
• Fixed HTML export to not rewrite file location for files referenced in the XSL file which don't exist.
• Fixed Column View report to sort numerically when needed.
• Fixed Date fields to suppress empty date values.
• Fixed Date comparisons to work for single digits, patch from Jake Maciejewski.
• Fixed Fields Dialog to show warnings when clicking Ok.
• Changed Quick Filter to split words on whitespace.
• Fixed bug with z39.50 search freezing intermittently.

Issue #12 of Dragonia Magazine contains a review of Tellico, albeit in what I take to be Polish. Here's the intro:

Nie znam osoby, która na którymś etapie swego życia (zwykl w dzieciństie) nie kolekcjonowałaby czegoś. Niektórzy nie wyrośliz t zego, a ich kolekcje książek, płyt czy monet urosły do wielkości przekraczających możlości zarządzania, jakie daje kartka i długopis.

And finally,

Zdecydowanie mocną stoną program u jest zrozumienie potrzeb potencjalnego użytkownika; pola opisujące każdy typ kolekcji są już bez dodatkowej konfiguracji dobrze dobrane , a szczególnie atrakcyjne jest wyszukiwanie informacji o alumbach czy książkach w Internecie z poziomu programu. O szczędza to masę czasu który potrzebny byłby do opisania pozycji.

Sounds positive, I guess...

UPDATE: Piotr Krakowiak was very kind and sent me some translation, Thanks!

Definitely the strongest feature of the program is an understanding of the potential user's needs; the text fields, describing each type of collection are - even without additional tweaking - well chosen and are sufficiently meaningful. What's also attractive is the ability to search for albums or books on the Internet without leaving the program window. This saves a lot of time that would be necessary to describe each item in our catalogue.

Eric Fleming at AssociatedContent has published a short review of Tellico.

In conclusion, if you are looking for this type of software, whether it be to keep track of your collection of priceless stamps for insurance purposes, or to be able to see which of your movies is missing, then Tellico is an excellent choice. It's fast, easy to use, provides attractive output options, and is - as a bonus to all of that - completely free!

Thanks!

Gerhard Czech recently wrote a nice overview of using Tellico, Tellico Bedienungsanleitung. Yup, it's in German. Here's a quote:

Tellico ist ein Programm mit dem es auf einfache Art und Weise möglich ist kleine Datenbanken zu erstellen. Dabei benutzt Tellico für die Datenbanken die Bezeichnung Sammlungen.

Jede Sammlung kann beliebig viele Datensätze (Tellico benutzt hierfür die Bezeichnung Einträge) enthalten, jeder Eintrag wiederum beliebig viele Felder. Tellico speichert diese Sammlungen in einer einzigen Datei (Dateiendung .tc).

It's always neat whenever Tellico gets mentioned in a distribution review, implying that Tellico's inclusion was notable. In this case, linux.com mentions it in their review of Vector Linux SOHO 5.8.

Thanks to the work of Doruk Fişek, Tellico is now in the Pardus Linux package tree. Thanks to the work of Ali Isingor and Kunter Kutlu, it is completely translated in Turkish, bringing to 15 the number of languages into which Tellico has been translated with 70% or better coverage. Pretty cool!

I'm going to go ahead and push a new version of Tellico, even with the mailing list issues. Tellico 1.2.11 is available. The changelog includes:

• Improved save time by caching image info on load.
• Fixed crashing bug for OpenOffice.org connection.
• Fixed bug that could lose images when loading from XML.
• Fixed sorting for Dependent fields to match on subfields.
• Updated IMDb search.
• Fixed CDDB lookup for OpenBSD, patch from Marc Espie.

There seems to be a problem with Tellico's mailing list. I've sent several emails to it in the last few days, and none have showed up in the archives. I've had direct contact with a few users who say they haven't received anything either. So I wrote the forge-dev mailing list and filed a bug.

I don't know if the problem is spam blocking or an actual issue with the mailing list software. I'm beginning to look at hosting the mailing list and maybe the SVN and website elsewhere. Stay tuned...

Here are the number of downloads of Tellico by month:

So far, the average for all versions is well over 700 per month. Lately, I've had about one release per month.

Marc Espie let me know that he'd imported Tellico into OpenBSD ports. He also provided a patch for supporting CD info from FreeDB on OpenBSD. I really appreciate that.

I've had quite a few bug fixes for Tellico lately, so I've got another version released, Tellico 1.2.10.

• Fixed crashing bug when undoing collection import.
• Fixed hanging bug when stopping a z39.50 search.
• Fixed bug that hid some amazon search results.
• Fixed ONIX export to validate.
• Fixed Alexandria export.
• Fixed Alexandria cover image import.
• Updated Amazon search for newer API.
• Fixed error handling for ISBN-13 searches.
• Updated ibs.it searching.
• Fixed searching to properly replace all HTML entities.
• Added Blu-ray and HD DVD to video media.
• Changed collection merge to concatenate paragraph fields.
• Improved collection merging.

Tellico 1.2.9 is available. Changelog is:

• Updated IMDb search.
• Fixed sorting for entries with rating = 10.
• Fixed bug with formatting dependent fields.
• Fixed bug with adding spaces following a comma in the editor.
• Changed MODS import to allow any result with typeOfResult = text.
• Fixed several bugs with i18n issues.

Plenty of thanks go to Jens Seidel for several patches that he sent dealing with the translation issues.

On the Tellico email list, Tobias Gruetzmacher pointed out that you can subscribe without going through the Novell Forge account creation process. I've been asked a couple of times about that. It's also come up on the forge-dev mail list.

I added a short page about it to the Tellico website.

Doruk Fişek has a patch against Tellico 1.2.8 for importing bitrate during the audio file import. You just have to be able to read Turkish! Or just read his email to the tellico-users email list about it.

Since I'm not adding new strings to the Tellico-1.2 branch, I'll probably just check this into SVN trunk, or the (never-to-be-released) tellico-1.3 branch. I know better than to ever really be surprised at what data or how someone uses Tellico. It's always fun to come across new stuff like this.

Tellico 1.2.8 is available, with some assorted bug fixes.

• Fixed bug with secondary and tertiary sorting.
• Fixed bug with some z39.50 search results not showing up.
• Fixed bug with comparing relative URLs when importing a file catalog.
• Fixed "ISBN Not Found" dialog to have selectable text.
• Fixed "busy cursor doesn't go away" in the download stuff dialog.
• Fixed the newstuff download to uninstall cleanly.
• Fixed compilation error in yaz include, patch from Markus Brueffer.
• Updated CDDB import to grab extd data as comments, and category as keyword.
• Updated audio file importer to take disc number into account for mp3, ogg, and flac files.
• Changed IMDB rating to allow float values.
• Updated translations for pt and pt_BR.

One thing that I repeatedly get requests for in Tellico is to support multiple collections in one database. Most other collection managers do have some facility for that, so for Tellico 2, I'm going to try to oblige. And this is built on a SQL backend at the moment, too. Here's a screen grab of my current development tree:

There's nothing really happening there, just creating some default fields in the database for each collection type and setting up the widgets in the GUI. Still, it's a start.

The January/February 2007 issue of Linux Pratique, a french-language Linux magazine, featured a review of Tellico. Since French is the only other language I can pretend to read, I asked if someone on the email list could send me a copy. Patrick Guignot was kind enough to do so. Gérez vos collections les plus diverses avec Tellico 1.2 is a pretty nice run-through of what Tellico can do. It mentions data entry and custom collections, searching Internet sources (even how to remove the Amazon link field), importing and exporting, and generating reports.

These kind of reviews are always so cool to read. I show them to my friends, even though most of them have no idea what Linux is, much less KDE. And since they know I'm a geek and "play" on computers as a hobby, they just sorta nod their heads and humor me. But they enjoy seeing my enjoyment, to be sure.

Update: this note is not meant to be critical of these users in any way. Sorry if it came across as insulting, I really didn't mean it to be. On the contrary, it was more of an apology on my part for not designing Tellico better, so that its capabilities were presented better.

I'm not real good with user interface design. There are some features in Tellico that people just never come across, and if they care enough, they might email me to ask. But there are probably plenty of folks who just give up and decide Tellico can't do what they need it to. For software features, that's generally called discoverability, I think. That would also cover features that people know exist, but can't find.

For example, the fact that getting information about an audio CD is done through the File->Import->Import Audio CD menu isn't clear to Sean. It's certainly reasonable to suppose that CDDB lookup should be defined as a data source in the configuration, as he does, but that's not the way I was thinking when I put that feature in. So Tellico (and I) failed Sean, so to speak. And I wouldn't blame him if he's rather frustrated about that. The same thing happened to another user when he wanted to try to catalog the files on a CD, which Tellico can do. But that capability wasn't evident enough.

Similarly, when Christ Mostek wanted to add a new book to his collection by getting data from Amazon, he expected that function to be available when he clicked New Entry rather than from a completely different dialog, accessed from Edit->Internet Search. The perceived inability to create a book directly from Amazon was enough for Chris to use a different application altogether for the initial data entry. Sorry, Chris!

Entering multiple values, such as authors or keywords, is probably one of the most non-intuitive and hard to discover features. I coded the data entry as a single line edit, and expect users to separate values with a semi-colon. There's really no way for anyone to know that without reading the docs or looking at some other entry. And people sometimes miss that. I can hardly blame them.

I want Tellico to be easy and simple to use, truly. :-) So I look at other similar applications, to see if I can mimic expected behavior or terminology. Sometimes, I'll move menu items around or re-phrase them. The data entry dialog does need a good bit of work. Once I get the v2 SQL backend put in, then I hope to give it some loving. Certainly, I'll try to make entering multiple values more intuitive and obvious.

Aside from that, I do take suggestions! The mailing list is the place to send them. Tellico does suffer a bit trying to be a general collection manager, rather than specifically for books or movies. But I'm always looking to improve it.

Congratulations go to Tian, with his work on GCstar, which hit version 1.0.0 this past weekend. He's added music collection management, to go along with books, movies, and video games.

I'll admit, I get a few crashes when I try it. Mostly associated with errors like

Magic number checking on storable file failed at lib/Storable.pm (autosplit into lib/auto/Storable/fd_retrieve.al) line 349, <RCOMMAND> line 1, at /usr/local/bin/../lib/gcstar/GCPlugins.pm line 88

but it's a very capable application, with many more search sources than Tellico. Heck, you can even use all of GCstar's data sources in Tellico.

So while changing the sort order to take into account title articles, in Tellico 1.2.7, I broke the secondary and tertiary sorting, which is useful for series and series number. I don't expect to make a 1.2.8 release quite yet, so here's a patch.

Or grab the SVN revision.

You could also just define another field that combines the series name and series number. The field type is Dependent and you put %{series} %{series_num} in the field description. That combines the two values and lets you sort quickly.

Tellico 1.2.7 is available. One critical fix is a possibility of losing cover images if you save them in the data file itself, rather than the app directory, and you have a image field shown in the column view. Basically, there were competing calls to the image cache which messed things up. I'm pretty sure that's the only case that could result in image loss, so if you don't save images in the data file (and if you have more than 100 or so, you shouldn't be) you should be ok.

Changelog:

• Fixed bug that could cause images to be lost when loading from data file.
• Fixed bug with saving URL values without the protocol.
• Fixed