Items cataloging.

[Zugrik]

Hello, Martin.

Can't find this improvement proposal in any opened nor closed issues. So, what about making categories with different levels, forming a kind of hierarchy? The problem is that my base is almost at 10k items level and I find too little instruments to sort them out. Of course, we have a projects, but it seems just not enough. I get your main point of categories as custom keywords, however they can be more of use. After all, structuring the knowledge is the main goal of I, Librarian that have all articles already present in web. And sorting things out is the main difference from randomly placed info in internet.

I already made this hierarchy by adding some number of "!" or other symbols at the beginning of category name, to force their sorting. But I believe it's not that difficult to add a level to category, singling out top ones, e.g. "physics", "mathematics", "chemistry", and lower ones, "lasers", "plasma", "quantum mechanics", "geometry" and so on. Also it assumes that in categories tree lower levels will not be seen until some of higher ones will be chosen.

Best,
Eugene.

[Zugrik]

Another way to sort things out is to introduce folder system to Librarian, leaving categories as they are. Let the every user organize the own folder tree, where he can place all the items. As in file system folder can contain a number of subfolders and/or library items. Placing this tree in the left panel will help to navigate the large amount of data. And of course, omnitool should place items in any given folder as in projects. Organizing folders in sql tables also seems not harder than with projects or categories. Personal folder settings seems to be very helpful for big libraries and sufficient number of users as every user may have own point of view how to organize all the data and singling out a group of items he is most interested in.

And again I'm stressing out that structuring is vital for large bases having a lot of users and a variety of fields covered by articles and books. But as for now Librarian doesn't offer enough powerful instruments to arrange it.

Hope you will find this improvement reasonable and worth implementing.

Best,
Eugene.

[mkucej]

Personal folder settings seems to be very helpful for big libraries and sufficient number of users as every user may have own point of view how to organize all the data and singling out a group of items he is most interested in.

You hit the nail on the head here. Categories being shared is one of the major reasons why they are not hierarchical. The hierarchy you create will be difficult to use by other users and vice versa. Simple category network is easier to understand and work with in groups. To that end, we renamed categories to tags in 5.0 to better reflect what they do.

That being said personal virtual folders is an interesting idea that we will definitely investigate. Thank you for your suggestion.

[Zugrik]

Now I totally agree on categories thing. And renaming to tags is very reasonable and should work out.

And some more ideas on folders, if you will:

1. storing folders table should be easy, as we need only folder id, name and parent folder id to fully describe each one.
2. users should have an option to share their folder structure or given folder with others. Database-wise is shouldn't be a problem.
3. Adding items to folder really shouldn't be harder than managing categories or projects.
4. Managing folders can take place at settings page not to cloak main window, as we do with categories, but now in personal way for every user.
5. A warning for deleting non-empty folder will be very useful.

Hope it will help in some way.
And thank you for appreciating this suggestion. It will be great.

Best,
Eugene.