Improving navigation on LibraryThing

I am currently working on a rather large personal Common Knowledge project, reviewing nearly 9,000 records, and I am constantly frustrated at the difficulties in navigating. I am adding person/character, important locations, and important events, as well as checking for additional authors, changing incorrectly entered authors, and adding genres. I am not altering all 9,000 records, just skimming the pages for items that might need altering.

Only a few pages show at a time, so I have to advance each page separately. I am currently on page 13 of the list, but so few pages show at the bottom that I have to click twelve times to get to that page. It is, of course, only getting worse.
Making things worse, the links to pages are only at the bottom, so I have to scroll down for every page.

Secondly, if I want to go from an item record back to the list so that I can do the next item, it often sends me back to page 1 of the list, not the page that I am working on. Which means that I have to go through the pages one by one again.

Other parts of LibraryThing show multiple pages, making it much faster to move to a particular page, and sometimes functions, such as combine, are at both the top and bottom of the page, which reduces scrolling.

>1 PuddinTame: Not sure what you mean by only a few pages show at a time, but what might be helpful is the fact that you can reorganize modules on book pages and put CK or whatever at the top. To avoid your catalogue reverting to page 1 when using the back button of your browser, I'd suggest opening book pages in a new tab. Also, you can sort or filter your catalogue in numerous ways, so consider using tags or collections to make navigating your project easier. e.g move everything you've checked to 'done' collection. Once you've finished with the project, you can easily revert collections or tags to what you want through power edit.

>1 PuddinTame: I don't know what you mean by "list" but if you mean your catalog, you can change the number of items that show up per page by clicking on "settings" at the top of the page. If you want to be able to go back to a page that is not the first page, you can navigate to where you want to be and then click "permanent link" at the bottom of the page to get a URL that is exactly what view you are on instead of a general catalog URL

>SandraArdnas >norabelle414 I mean the number of pages that show at the bottom when I do a site search. I'm not going through my own catalog. There is a person/people who are entering people/character entries in the format lastname, first name instead of the preferred firstname, lastname. I've decided to leave them their preferred format, but I am adding the usual format as well.

In addition I have found at least a hundred records that have no p/c entries at all, and I'm trying to improve the records that I come across by adding authors, important places, important events, and genres. I've also united records for the same title. A lot of people have put in records with no information except the title. If I can figure out who the author is, e.g., it has a very unusual title, or the author(s) is/are on the cover, I add them to the record.

The one thing that I am not trying to do is sort out the various editions of the prolific author's works. Mercifully, that takes up a lot of the 9,000 records.

I'll try your suggestion about a permanent link, thank you.

I'm not sure that one can do a permalink. I looked it up in help, and only found a reference for using it with reviews, not an explanation of how it's done. I have tried copying the URL of the page that I'm working on, but it just brings up the first page of the site search. I'm going to attack it another way,

At least some Common Knowledge fields can be included in a customized list view. In Your books you can select the List tab. There are five lettered styles A through E and the gear icon can allow you to customize them by dragging fields of interest from the list on the right of the page (at least this is how it looks on the computer browser).

So, let's say you modify E view to include your other fields that are part of CK. You can then use the Lightning Bolt icon to get into Power Edit mode. You can search to get the list you want and/or use checkboxes to select book rows. I know you can do things like add/remove tags, add/remove a book to/from a collection. I haven't played with things like CK: Character information.

Often when editing CK data there will be a warning modal to remind you that you are editing information that applies to all LT members.

Take note that the entry of names in CK for characters is different than authors.

This is perhaps not a complete solution but it might get you closer. You might need to do an intermediate step such as adding a tag for a character. This would be distinct to your catalog and not part of CK.

There are a couple approaches within what the LT system provides that could get you where you want to go. Not everything requires a new feature which is unlikely to be added so long as nearly all of the development effort is going towards "LT2" to make the entire system responsive and feature updated style and appearances. Some bugs are fixed but there are not a lot of new features other than some graphs.

It could help with some specific examples of what you are trying to do and how you are approaching it.

James

>5 PuddinTame:
Re. permalink: in this context, it's a link that is found near the foot of many pages which can be copied and pasted, to aid explaining which exact page you are looking at.

For example: https://www.librarything.com/search.php?search=testing+a+search&searchtype=n...
If you access that page, you'll see near the end of the page in the centre the "permalink" link, which is what I grabbed to get this link.

Re-reading through, is it a particular search results page (eg. in doing a CK field search) that you're on that has no paging (or insufficient) options, that is the core of the problem?

I've done a site search. As I see it the core of the problem is the lack of paging options. If it were like the options for my own catalog, it would be fine.

I tried using a permalink, and I may have done it wrong, but it brings me back to the first page of the sort.

I'm working on the CK People/Character field, but so far, more than a hundred records don't even have anything in the field, so I'm putting it there, as well as adding other information.

FYI, I am not putting anything in the CK field for books that the subject wrote, since they are not autobiographical as far as I know. I don't know enough about those books and their various editions and printings to fool with those. I am only editing books ABOUT the person.

This is a record that I have worked on: https://www.librarything.com/work/8578673
I added the person, the important place, and the important event. I may have worked on the genres. I also found records with nothing but the title, or the title done as "Title by Author", with no author entry. In this case, I felt that the title was sufficiently distinctive to add Johnson as the author and combine the records.

Library Thing's website/webpage is totally and completely for people with disabilities. I am legally blind, I only can use audiobooks, and your site is very unfriendly. It is hard to reach the audiobook section and then it is very hard to find what you are searching for, then the selection is hard to download. I use Bard Mobile, Bookshare Mobile, and Library thing. Out of the three, yours is not good. I read over 100 books a year, which improves my quality of life.

>10 BillyG6: Um, this isn't a lending library. You can't download the book at all.
This is just a catalog of books people have/have read.

>10 BillyG6: If you haven't found "the audiobook section", that is because there is none. The records of audio books are combined into the same work as the paper copies and ebooks (as long as they are not abridged).

Since this is a database about the books people have a relationship with, and not a place where people can access/download the books, this works better here. I often look for reviews of a book I might read, and it doesn't really matter what format someone read the book in.

>10 BillyG6: Hi and welcome to LibraryThing.
As others have said, this is not an access site, but for cataloging your books and discussing books.
You might find audio ideas in this group:
https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/488/Audiobooks
But the site is all text driven.
Best wishes