Time really flies! I can’t believe it has been four months since our last update, but that doesn’t mean we have stopped working. Here is an update of what we have done since our last update, and the big headline is catalogs!
But let’s start with our other work: We have been steadily adding more films and covers. Especially for German films. We now have 580 German films in the database, and 455 of them have a cover. Adding films will be something we work on for years, but little by little we add to the content of the database, and I keep reminding myself that this is a marathon and not a sprint. We now have 6285 films in the database in total and 2336 with a cover.
There are also work that no one sees: We sometimes need to upgrade our frameworks that the software is built with, for security or other reasons. That is work that needs to be done, but there is no visible result for the users. We did such an upgrade in August.
We have also been working on the search functionality making the auto completer much faster. It used to be a bit laggy, and that has been frustrating me for a long time, but I never had the time to fix it properly as there was always something more important work to be done. If you were typing fast, you would also notice a delay. But now the code has been much improved, and the search suggestions will appear instantly and there is no laggy input for fast typers.
And now to the big news: We have added catalogs to Super8database. For now it is just a very few, but this will hopefully increase over time. On a distributors page we now list catalogs if we have any.
We have started the work of finding and marking films in the database that exists in the catalog. These films will have a section referring to the catalogs and which page the film has been found on:
If you click on on of the referrals, the catalog will be opened and you will get a red marking of where the info for this film is found:
For pages with dense film info, this hopefully will be a good help for the user. As always in our database, the info is available for you to download. If you click on the download button you get many choices like downloading the marked area for the film in question as an image, the entire page as an image, the catalog as a PDF or lists of all films identified in the catalogs:
All PDFs have been treated with OCR, so the text is searchable, even in an external PDF viewer.
Please keep in mind that this is a lot of work, and there will be an ongoing work for a very long time. As we have released this functionality now, there will be films in the catalogs that has not been correctly identified, and films in the catalogs we haven’t registered yet. Still we think that the catalogs in the state as it is now will be useful for you, and have decided to release this now while we work on the content, so please be patient with us.
This addition means that we are interested in receiving more catalogs. The scanning of a catalog requires quite some work, so we will not publish any catalogs unless we get a permission from the person that did the actual scanning himself/herself. But any catalogs sent to us where the person that did the scanning gives us the permission to use the scan will be most appreciated!