Advice on organising information needed (books)

[Aglavra Owl]

Hello! I started to use Memento Database recently and I feel very excited about it, as it seems to be a really good solution for organising different things in my life. Now I want to create a catalogue of books and need an advice, I see, that there is a premade template for books library, but my task has some nuances. 

1) I participate in many reading challenges (reading the books following certain list of authors, topics etc) 

2) I want to track which book series I read because there are many unfinished ones. 

I see, that a simple solution will be just adding two text fields, "series" and "challenge", but I'll need to type it repeatedly many times because usually there are many books belonging to one challenge. And there are too much of book series to use a predefined list of options. Furthermore, I want to keep additional information, like "how many books are in the series in total" or "when the challenge ends". Maybe I could use some entry linking here (adding separate pages for series and challenges, with several fields for each, and then add "entry link" fields to the Main page (with book description). So I will see for which challenge I will read the book and when is a deadline. 

But I'm not sure and I would like to hear more experienced users. What is an optimal way to organise information in this case? 

 

[Bill Crews]

It sounds to me like you want to do a fair amount of stuff and are standing on the precipice of using linked libraries. I suggest you go ahead and jump over that hurdle.

I suggest you think separately about each "thing", only if a thing is just a plain list, it should become a library. For instance, if a Series is just a name, let that field be a Single-choice List or Radio-buttons. But if you want also a description or other information kept about a series, make it a library.

You'll probably also want a library of authors, so you can know more than their names. In fact, I suggest checking out Autofill for use in this area, as I know Memento has the ability to look up information the the web and populate your library with it. Then you can build your own special stuff around that.

About linking... By default, a Link to Entry field is set to many-to-many. This is good for simple hierarchies. It is simple; if an author wrote three books, it a Link field in Authors, and link to each of her Books.

However, in this area, you have genres, serieses, books, authors, publishers, club members, etc. If you end up with more than just a couple of libraries in your database, things will work much better if you put the link (in my previous example) in the Books library to its author in Authors (or People) and make it a one-to-many link. Then all the libraries will hold together better and allow you to fully utilize Memento's slicing & dicing features, like Sorting, Grouping, Filtering, Charting, and Aggregation.

[Isaac OLEG]

Hello, this is not my exact problem but those basics helped me. Thanks.

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