A former life as an Acquisitions Librarian left me with the phobia of not having control of the titles I have ordered. The problem I has was that when I placed an order for a book or a disc I needed to know from where, how much, when it was shipped and a due date for a follow-up if it was overdue. The solution was sitting in Bookpedia.
I’ve been using Bookpedia and DVDpedia for a couple of years to track my purchases, mostly mail orders from around the world, and thought I’d share with you some of the adaptations I’ve made which might be of use to other Pedia users. I’ll use BookPedia as the example but I think that all that follows can be recreated in the other Pedias also.
To track my orders I needed to create a new library which had only those items I’d bought and was expecting too arrive in the near future. But we will return to that as the final step in setting up.
To begin I used the pre-existing Bookpedia fields called Purchased At, Purchased On, Due Date and Paid.
and then I created a few new fields. These were: Posted, Arrived, and On Order. The first three of these will be date fields and the last one will be a check box.
To explain the purpose of the existing fields first:
Purchased At: Name of vendor. This builds an authority list as you go so a return visit to a bookseller will auto-populate that field as you start to type it.
Purchased On: This is a date field so it understands the numeral value of a date. For simplicity just add 30 6 14 for the last day in June, which happens to be the day I wrote this. I guess it works the other way for you whacky Americans who enter days and months the wrong way around. Your Mac’s System Preferences may determine this.
Date Due: This is the same field which records the due date of borrowed books. It would be preferable to create a new one but there are too few additional date fields available to do this. Note here that it’s important to delete the date when your book arrives or you will get ‘overdue’ notices when you return to the record at a date later than the due date.
Paid: The cost of the purchase
I added the following new fields, though the titles are variable:
Posted (or Shipped): A date field for the date on which your order was sent. This is usually advised by large vendors or if not it may be in a confirmation email or your online account details. You can call it whatever you wish. Same difference.
Arrived (or Received): To record the date of arrival of your order. Strictly speaking not necessary but completeists will want this field. It can be useful to compare orders and to see if it’s appropriate to expect one week delivery or three weeks delivery from a particular vendor or location such as a foreign supplier.
On Order. This is a checkbox field, necessary to distinguish an entry for a book in your Pedia library as an order.
To create these new fields you will need to open the preferences in Bookpedia and select Fields. At this point also decide in which view they will be visible. The option on the right in Add Edit Panel will allow either Main or Extras, which translates as the first or the second panel in that view option. It does not matter which, but it’s convenient to have them grouped together. I prefer to have all these acquisition tasks isolated from the main cataloguing information so I chose to place them in the Extras tab.
Posted: Select the next available Custom Text field. For most users this will be the first time you’ve employed this field so it will have the numeral 1.
Arrived: As above, just select the subsequent Custom Text field and rename it.
On Order: Find Custom Checkbox 1 and rename it On Order.
Of course, you can continue to add additional fields as you find appropriate.
To Create your On Order smart library -
Choose: File > New Smart Collection (or Command/Option/N)
From the box that appears select On Order. The caption ‘Is Set’ is the default and activates this check box. Click OK
Give the new library a name, something like On Order, and you’re done. To have it sit at the top of the list of libraries you will need to add a space before the first character. This will then have it display under Wish List but before any other library you have.
To tidy up the columns displayed in the list of titles in the new On Order library click on the new library name and use the Command/J keys or Right Click and select View Options to select which columns to display. I’d suggest ticking the boxes to see Title (obviously), Purchased At, Purchased On, Posted, Due Date, Paid. Comments will also be a useful field to have on view. Then you can order them by any of these selections - date due might be the most useful if you have several orders on the way.
Now you can see what your orders are, when they are due, and what is overdue requiring follow-up action.
All that remains to do is to buy something from your Wish List (or create a new record) and to complete the fields as above and move it to your main library.
When you receive an order, remove the tick in the On Order checkbox, delete the date in the Date Due field, add a date in the Arrived/Received field. Click OK and your entry will remove itself from the On Order library.
One of the reasons I chose the Pedias rather than some other cataloguing software was its adaptability. This is a good example of how I can tweak Bookpedia to manage a specific need. I also use these order fields when I buy an item off the shelf, just as a record of a purchase.