Bookpedia: Doghouse Profile and Data Import

[tbutler]

I would like to submit two feature requests:

1.) Somewhere on your site, I ran across a reference to Collectorz.com's software as an alternative for Windows users. Out of curiosity, I clicked the link and noted one feature -- Connect -- they offered that I would love to see with the *Pedias. What about an optional public profile for each Pedia user listing the content they've sent in from their Pedias? I'd love to be able to publicly share my book library (ideally in a searchable form) and it seems that tying that to Doghouse would only encourage greater participation in Doghouse. While it is true the Pedias can export a web page, a dynamic solution that was kept in sync with the app (and maybe even provided cloud synchronization to Pocketpedia 3) would be a huge advance and much more convenient for sharing than merely exporting a long list page.

Essentially, this would be the core function of LibraryThing minus the issue that there isn't a clean way to sync Bookpedia with LibraryThing (and, especially, there isn't a good way to import into LibraryThing while maintaining all the custom information I've input into Bookpedia). Since my office computer is, unfortunately, a Windows PC, this would also be helpful when I wanted to look up information while away from my MacBook Pro.

2.) It would be nice if there was a way to set up a multi-stage import, so that Bookpedia wouldn't stop importing data after the first good match. For example, I want LOC call #'s, so I always need to fetch info from LOC or from my local consortium, MOBIUS, as part of an import. I also want the best quality book cover, which usually means importing from Amazon. Finally, if certain key fields are still not filled in, I might try the U. of Chicago or another good Z39.50 source before manually cleaning up the results. It'd be nice if some of this could be automated, since typically if you go in that order, it produces really quite acceptable results automatically.

Thanks! I really love Bookpedia. Keep up the good work!

Best,
Tim

[Nora]

Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful feedback Tim. Your first point is something we're working towards with Doghouse but it'll be a while before we can get all the features working seamlessly the way we want to. But that is definitely one of the ideas behind the site too, to allow users to interact more with each other if they'd like.
Regarding the cumulative search: that's a tricky one to model in the UI for easy understanding on the users' side but I'm sure it's something others would be interested in as well. We'll see what we can do in the future to make this happen somehow.