Sonny Software

Hi,

I've been spending my time in Bookends cleaning up the list of authors in the sibling panel of Groups with the Replace function (I was looking for "Merge" for a bit at first). It got me thinking that this part could perhaps use some love in the future iterations of Bookends.

I could see a value in a new screen for an author where you could add additional fields like a photo, contact information, affiliation, your own notes about them and tags. One could also highlight his most frequent co-authors from our library, his works with some colour coding for the deepest colour for works with the most citations, etc.

These are some loose ideas I wanted to share with the development team. Perhaps, the implementation of those idea would unnecessarily bloat Bookends or even change its scope.

Would anyone also find use in such features?

Cheers,
m.

To your first point, Bookends has a "merge" function for Term Lists, it's done via drag and drop, and is faster and more intuitive than find/replace. Please see the user guide (Help menu) for how that works.

As for the suggestion...that would make Bookends a very different kind of app. We generally try to add features organically, i.e. that fit with the general theme of reference management. What you are asking for belongs in a different sort of application (contacts? mind-mapping? organization charts? something else?).

I will point out that you can perhaps make a crude, but possibly useful, use of hypertext links to get want you want. Just spitballing, but you could create a reference with that author's name and maybe something in the title like "Professional Information". Add your own notes and keywords if you like. Then highlight the name in the edit field, right click -> Create Link -> paste in the URL of the author's institutional web page. If you haven't seen it, this short video tutorial shows the ways in which hypertext links can be useful in Bookends

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCp8R_tUuD8

I'd be interested to hear from others, too.

Jon
Sonny Software

To your first point, Bookends has a "merge" function for Term Lists, it's done via drag and drop, and is faster and more intuitive than find/replace. Please see the user guide (Help menu) for how that works.

Right, I forgot about that. Thanks!

As for the suggestion...that would make Bookends a very different kind of app. We generally try to add features organically, i.e. that fit with the general theme of reference management. What you are asking for belongs in a different sort of application (contacts? mind-mapping? organization charts? something else?).

Sure, hence my comment at the end that this perhaps is out of Bookends scope. Perhaps something less elaborate with the authors? Maybe photos (and all additional attachment management and sync) would be indeed too much. You know, just in case you need some extra feature for that 18.0 release.

I will point out that you can perhaps make a crude, but possibly useful, use of hypertext links to get want you want. Just spitballing, but you could create a reference with that author's name and maybe something in the title like "Professional Information". Add your own notes and keywords if you like. Then highlight the name in the edit field, right click -> Create Link -> paste in the URL of the author's institutional web page. If you haven't seen it, this short video tutorial shows the ways in which hypertext links can be useful in Bookends

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCp8R_tUuD8

I did see it and it is an excellent feature.

I'd be interested to hear from others, too.

Me too!