Introduction and Questions: Improving aBook for VDKC's Choir Library Project

[_vdkc_]

Hello everyone,

My name is Sebastian, and I am a project manager for VDKC, an association in Germany representing the interests of over 500 concert choirs. We are currently working on modernizing our library, which contains over 1,000 music scores, and cataloging it with suitable software. Our project aims to enable VDKC to record the media of its central library, while also allowing the music librarians of member choirs to independently catalog and present their own collections.

After researching suitable software that is easy for laypeople to use, we discovered aBook and immediately fell in love with it. Our website is already based on Joomla, so transitioning to aBook was a natural step. We are deeply grateful for the dedicated and voluntary work that has gone into making this refined service available to the public.

We have already revised and normalized our simple inventory list to import entries of authors, publishers, and media into aBook via SQL and CSV import—a substantial task, but the results have been worth the effort.

During our work with aBook and our UX testing, several questions and requests have arisen. I would like to present some of them here and inquire about possible improvements before our next rollout step in September:

1. Ease of Adding New Books: The dropdown menus for Author and Publisher are not very user-friendly, as they cannot be searched using a search field in the backend (this also affects performing a Lend). In the frontend, these fields can be searched with strings. We plan to import standard databases for composers and music publishers into aBook, resulting in about 8,000 entries in the Authors field. A solution would be to enable a rudimentary search by last name using the keyboard, which currently only works with first names for us.

2. German Translation Availability: We need a complete German translation for the software in both the front and back end. I am willing to create this translation and share it with the community. How can I proceed with this? Is there a central translation file that I can access via FTP?

3. Access for External Library Workers Without Joomla Admin Access: We need a robust rights management system for our library to provide access to the music librarians of member choirs without them logging into the Joomla backend. Ideally, we want to avoid Joomla backend access altogether. If this is not possible, is there a way to restrict access so that users can only interact with the aBook component? Additionally, within the aBook component, can we further restrict permissions so users can only edit their entries? How does this work with creating and removing libraries, tags, categories, etc.? We aim to keep things as uniform as possible.

4. The Lending Process: We want to allow members to lend music material to other choirs, functioning like a library. However, the lending process in aBook currently does not support this. Music materials are requested for a specific future date and then sent by mail. The Lend Request feature is promising, but we need an additional lending status, such as "confirmed," which would prevent further lending of the same item during the requested period. Currently, the "Lend" status globally prevents the item from being marked as "lent" again, even if the requested periods do not overlap.

Thank you for taking the time to read my introduction and inquiries. I hope to receive some guidance and support on these matters from this wonderful community. I am available for any further questions and look forward to contributing and collaborating here.

Best regards,
Sebastian

[federica]

Hi Sebastian,
I'm happy to hear that you are trying Abook for your project.

1. Ease of Adding New Books:
I added this improvements in my develop version. I will publish them as soon as possible

2. German Translation Availability:
go to translations,
download the sample language pack then read the instructions

3. Access for External Library Workers Without Joomla Admin Access:
You have to use Joomla ACL permissions to limit the access to Abook only. See Access Control List Tutorial

4. The Lending Process:
The loan process does not handle free time slots after or before the loan period. To realize this function you need a Time Slot Manager.

[_vdkc_]

Hi Federica,

Thank you so much for your kind and helpful response, and for your patience. I apologize for the late reply—I've been on vacation and busy with other projects, but I'm excited to be back and active again.

1. Ease of Adding New Books:
We are eagerly anticipating the next update and truly appreciate you making these improvements available! Will we need to switch to the beta version to benefit from this new feature? System stability is quite important for us, so it would be helpful to know how to proceed with this.

2. German Translation Availability:
I hadn't noticed the resources for translations before—thank you for pointing that out! The possibility to customize the software's language to better suit our needs is fantastic. We plan to rename "Authors" to "Composers" and "Books" to "Sheet Music," among other adjustments.

3. Access for External Library Workers Without Joomla Admin Access:
Our system administrator advised against creating too many Joomla accounts with backend access, even if they have limited internal rights. Unfortunately, we'll need to find an alternative solution, although your suggestion would certainly have been viable. I am currently considering developing something with Joomla Fabrik that would only access certain parts of the aBook database and could be used by Joomla users logged in through the frontend.

4. The Lending Process:
Do I understand correctly that a Time Slot Manager is not currently included in aBook and not available as a plugin? I'm considering creating a custom solution with Fabrik to handle this functionality.

Additionally, I wanted to share two insights from my experience working with aBook and importing over 1,100 media entries, which might be useful for other users:

It's effective to create authors, publishers, categories, collections, and potentially locations and tag structures directly via SQL statements in the import file. The individual media can then be imported more comfortably with the CSV import.
When performing a CSV import, it's important to note that the characters " and ' need to be escaped with a \ in most fields, while other UTF-8 characters do not cause issues. This realization cost me several hours of work The metadata and params fields should preferably be left empty.
Thank you again for your support and these valuable tips! I look forward to further work with aBook

Best regards,
Sebastian

[federica]

Hi Sebastian, welcome again!
I'll answer you point by point.

1. Ease of Adding New Books
The beta version is stable but I prefer to wait a bit before definitively renaming it as stable.

2. German Translation Availability
Great!

3. Access for External Library Workers Without Joomla Admin Access
I didn't know "Fabrik", thanks for introducing me to it.

4. The Lending Process
Yes, you understood correctly. ABook does not manage a Time Slot Manager.

5. csv import tool
I'm aware of this problem. I'm working to improve the tool.