Alexandria
Alexandria is a GNOME application for managing collections of books.
Alexandria is written in Ruby, and is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. See the file COPYING for more information.
What is Alexandria?
Alexandria is an application for managing a personal book library. Its main recommending feature is its clean, intuitive interface. Alexandria is able to retrieve book information and cover images from a wide variety of online data sources. It also features extensive import and export options, a loan interface, and smart libraries. Alexandria is written in Ruby using ruby-gnome2.
Where can I get it?
You can install alexandria as a gem by running
gem install alexandria-book-collection-manager
Alternatively, download the source from the github repository at http://www.github.com/mvz/alexandria-book-collection-manager and follow the installation instructions.
Where can I find out more?
For source code and bug reporting, see the repository on github at http://www.github.com/mvz/alexandria-book-collection-manager.
Features
Alexandria is a simple program designed to allow individuals to keep a catalogue of their book collection. In addition, it enables users to keep track of books which are on loan.
- retrieves and displays book information (sometimes with cover
pictures) from several online libraries and bookshops, such as
- WorldCat
- US Library of Congress
- British Library
- allows books to be added and updated by hand
- enables searches either by ISBN, title, author or keyword
- supports the Z39.50 standard and allow you to manage your own sources (e.g. university libraries)
- saves data using the plain-text YAML format
- can import and export data into ONIX, Tellico, ISBN-list and GoodReads CSV formats
- can export XHTML web pages of your libraries, themable with CSS
- allows marking your books as loaned, each with the loan-date and the name of the person who has borrowed them
- features a HIG-compliant user interface
- shows books in different views (standard list or icons list), that can be filtered and/or sorted
- handles book rating and notes
- supports CueCat and standard "keyboard wedge" barcode readers
- includes translations for several languages
- is documented in a complete manual (at the moment only in English and Japanese)
Alexandria is not without problems. See doc/BUGS for a summary of issues.
Installation
There are full instructions for installing Alexandria from source in the file INSTALL, including information about all the dependencies.
If you are installing on a Debian-based system, things should be easier as the dependencies can be handled automatically.
To run the program, just type
alexandria
or, to get verbose debugging information,
alexandria --debug
If you are running GNOME, Alexandria should appear under the 'Applications > Office' menu.
Contributors
The following people have contributed to Alexandria over the years:
Authors
- Alexander McCormmach [email protected]
- Aymeric Nys [email protected]
- Cathal Mc Ginley [email protected]
- Claudio Belotti [email protected]
- Constantine Evans [email protected]
- Dafydd Harries [email protected]
- Javier Fernandez-Sanguino Pena [email protected]
- Joseph Haig [email protected]
- Joseph Method [email protected]
- Kevin Schultz [email protected]
- Laurent Sansonetti [email protected]
- Marco Costantini [email protected]
- Mathieu Leduc-Hamel [email protected]
- Matijs van Zuijlen [email protected]
- Owain Evans [email protected]
- Pascal Terjan [email protected]
- Rene Samselnig [email protected]
- Robby Stephenson [email protected]
- Sun Ning [email protected]
- Takayuki Kusano [email protected]
- Timothy Malone [email protected]
- Zachary P. Landau [email protected]
Documenters
- Cathal Mc Ginley [email protected]
- Liam Davison [email protected]
Artists
- Andreas Nilsson [email protected]
- Stefanie Dijoux [email protected]
Translators
- Adrián Chaves Fernández [email protected] (gl)
- Cathal Mc Ginley [email protected] (ga)
- CHIKAMA Masaki [email protected] (ja)
- Dafydd Harries [email protected] (cy)
- Damjan Dimitrioski [email protected] (mk)
- Giacomo Margarito [email protected] (it)
- Jack Myrseh [email protected] (nb)
- Joachim Breitner [email protected] (de)
- José Ling [email protected] (zh_TW)
- Lennart Karssen [email protected] (nl)
- Lígia Moreira [email protected] (fr, pt, pt_BR)
- Martin Karlsson [email protected] (sv)
- Michael Kotsarinis [email protected] (el)
- Miguel Ángel García [email protected] (es)
- Peter Kováč [email protected] (sk)
- Petr Vanek [email protected] (cs)
- Piotr Drąg [email protected] (pl)
- Serhij Dubyk [email protected] (uk)
Former translators
- David Weinehall [email protected] (sv)
- Jiří Pejchal [email protected] (cs)
- Laurent Sansonetti [email protected] (fr)
- Lucas Rocha [email protected] (pt_BR)
- Marco Costantini [email protected] (it)
- Masao Mutoh [email protected] (ja)
- Mirko Maischberger [email protected] (it)
License
Unless otherwise noted, the following license applies to all files that are part of Alexandria:
Copyright (C) 2004 Laurent Sansonetti Copyright (C) 2005-2010,2014-2020 Alexandria Contributors
Alexandria is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See the file COPYING for details.