Please give us an anniversary feature

[Philologist]

I often have to write anniversary articles for journals and newspapers about people and famous books in the Humanities. A typical assignment could be an article about Thomas Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry", which first appeared 250 years ago. This task involves re-reading the book(s), assessment, influence on contemporaries and later reception. This is manageable if I know the anniversary date in advance and have time to make preparations before the deadline.

Is there any way to see in Bookends which groundbreaking books first appeared 100 years ago, without having to do all the calculation manually myself? Similarly, I would like to see which poets and writers were born (or died) in August 100 years ago, so that I have enough time to prepare, if a worthy candidate pops up. (I say 'enough time' because now we have April).

I guess this would require fields for date of birth and death, and a field for first year publication (which I already have in my database). Birth and death years, as well as the first year publication, would all have be automatically subtracted from the current date in order to calculate the anniversary years. If I then view the results in the column view, I would see immediately whether important events, worth writing about, are approaching.

Thank you.

[Jon]

You can set this up yourself. Redefine a few of the user-defined fields that you're not using now to hold birth and death years, etc. Then create a smart SQL group that searches for whatever criteria you wan (see the built-in searches that find recently-added references for an example of how date calculations are done). I can try to help you in writing such as search.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Philologist]

On Apr 27, 2015 1:39 pm Jon wrote:

Redefine a few of the user-defined fields that you're not using now to hold birth and death years

All but one of my user-defined fields for books seems to be already taken.

I could use u15 for BOTH birth and death years. Would that be an option?

Books.png (74.84 KiB) Viewed 4698 times

[Jon]

Yes, you could do that.

Jon
Sonny Software