01/28/2004
1.0

# The &bookcase; Handbook

Robby
Stephenson

    &email;

2001
2002
2003
2004
&robby;
&FDLNotice;

This document is a handbook for using &bookcase;, a collection manager software application.

KDE
bookcase
book
collection
database
catalog

## Introduction

### &bookcase;

&bookcase; is a program for managing collections. It began as a simple book collection manager, and has expanded to include default collection templates for bibliographies, comic books, videos, music, coins, stamps, trading cards, and wines. In addition, custom collections can be built for any other type of collectibles.

#### What &bookcase; Is

&bookcase; keeps track of the items in a collection, and offers an easy way to enter data for each entry. It provides several different field types, and allows for an unlimited number of user-defined fields. The entries in a collection may be grouped by any field for easy organization, and customizable views show as much or as little information as you like. Full text searching is available, as well as filtering to show a subset of your collection. Collections may be imported or exported using a variety of formats, to to allow for easy exchange or publication of data.

#### What &bookcase; Is Not

&bookcase; is not an audio or video player. It does not provide facilities for reading or modifying multimedia files. It also does not provide any image-editing functionality. It is not a full-blown bibliographic reference manager.

### Terminology

#### Collections

In &bookcase;, a collection is the document. Only one collection exists in each &bookcase; file. A collection contains any number of entries and fields. &bookcase; supports nine specific collection types by default: books, bibliographic entries, comic books, videos, music, trading cards, coins, stamps, and wines. In addition, an empty generic collection template is available for any other type of collectibles.

#### Collection Entries

An entry is the basic record in &bookcase;. Each entry contains a single value for each field in the collection. A collection may have an unlimited number of entries, in theory, although since the whole collection is always resident in memory, too many entries could slow down the application. &bookcase; has been tested with a collection of 10,000 entries, and the speed was satisfactory, however.

#### Collection Fields

Each collection may have an unlimited number of fields. &bookcase; supports ten types of fields, which allow for a range of different data. The fields can be edited with the &fields-dialog; and are explained further in the Field Types section.

&fundamentals-chapter;

&details-chapter;

&importing-exporting-chapter;

&configuration-chapter;

&menus-chapter;

&hacking-chapter;

&faqs-chapter;

## Credits and License

&bookcase;

Program copyright 2001-2004 &robby; &email;

Documentation copyright 2001-2004 &robby; &email;

&underFDL;

&underGPL;

## Installation

### How to obtain Bookcase

The &bookcase; home page can be found at &homepage;. Updates and news can be found there.

### Requirements

In order to successfully use &bookcase;, you need KDE 3.1.x. &bookcase; uses about 5 megabytes of memory to run, but this may vary depending on your platform and configuration.

&kde; can be found at the KDE home page.

You can find a list of changes at &homepage;.

### Compilation and Installation

In order to compile and install &bookcase; on your system, type the following in the base directory of the archive, where the third step must be done as root if you are installing in a system directory:

    % ./configure --enable-final --disable-debug
    % make
    % make install

Since &bookcase; uses autoconf and automake you should not have any trouble compiling it. Should you run into problems please report them to the the author at &email;.

&documentation.index;