Write library catalog program

rlwhitcomb / utilities

Some of my personal utility programs

MIT License

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Write library catalog program #246

Open rlwhitcomb opened 2 years ago

rlwhitcomb commented 2 years ago

For a personal library, here are some of the things to keep track of:

cover: paper, leather, hard
location: room / shelf - define these codes
ISBN
title
subtitle
author
publisher
edition
year published
number of pages
cover picture
condition : new, lightly, medium, heavily used
part of a set, links to others in the set
part of a series, with links to others
have other editions? with link
genre: poetry, romance, history, general fiction, non-fiction, technical, science, reference, fantasy/sci-fi, children's, photography
read? none of, started, finished, multiple times (number of times?), N/A (as in referred to)
has digital features (i.e., CD or downloads or online access?); types of digital features (how to define?)

rlwhitcomb commented 2 years ago

This would be a very interesting GUI project, but also a chance to hone our database skills, including picking the easiest embeddable Java database library.

rlwhitcomb commented 2 years ago

So, table structure could be:

LOCATIONS: id, name, description
TITLES: id, title
etc. for subtitle, author, publisher, edition (things we could present pull-down lists for)
IMAGES: id, name, description, type (PNG, BMP, etc., some string), blobstorage
BOOKS: titleid, subtitleid, authorid, publisherid, editionid, publishyear, numberpages, coverpictureimageid, etc.

rlwhitcomb commented 2 years ago

Other things to consider:

Multiple users, such as husband, wife, children, other family members
The "read?" field should be another table, not in the main BOOKS entry, because there could be: "Jim read part, Mary read it all, Susie is using it for reference only, etc."
READHISTORY: userid, bookid, type ("all", "part", etc.), date of entry, startingdate, ???
LIBRARY: owneruserid, address, location ("upstairs front room")
USERS: userid, firstname, lastname, preferredname
How to deal with books checked out to friends/relatives
Need to have common operations, like: "john started reading", "eric finished reading", "we gave it away", "bought a new book"
Preferred sources of books (like "Amazon", the local used book store)

rlwhitcomb commented 2 years ago

I'm going to suggest HSQLDB: http://hsqldb.org as the best database engine (highest-performance, most-flexible), with a BSD license