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I'm a relatively new user and am finding Eat Your Books really useful in uncovering my 'lost' recipes! 

Having said that, over 110 of my books, around 40%, are not indexed. Only 4 of the undindexed ones are currently being indexed. I'd be happy to help index some of these but the full indexing process seems like way too much for a paying customer to have to do. 

I would however be happy to commit to entering all the recipe titles and page numbers. It seems to me like this would probably help many people. I know that the site provides a lot of value by including ingredients, recipe type etc. but I think for many people just being able to see, for example, all recipes with quail or artichoke in the title would prove about 90% as useful. 

Would it be possible to add this type of partial indexing for those of us who'd like our recipes to be searchable and are prepared to go some of the way to helping? I do think this approach could unlock a lot more indexing support from members.

Brilliant idea and I'd love to join the list of volunteers to do just that.  I did some indexing back in my early membership days, but at this point don't have the time to get that involved.  Your suggestion would really help.  I have a collection of over a thousand books, only 779 are listed and of those only a little over 300 are indexed.  Half a loaf would be so much better than what I'm getting at this point.

I'm in a similar situation - about half of my books aren't indexed - and I would LOVE to just have titles to search on! I'd be happy to do a partial index myself, but the full indexing is way too daunting, I think. I agree with the concept, and I also like the suggestion that the search criteria could be modified to exclude partial results for those people who don't feel it would be helpful.  But I suspect that for many of us, it would be great and increase the value of our membership. At present, what I have done as an interim measure wastes time and paper: I photocopy the printed contents pages of each of my unindexed books. They go into a ring binder, so when I have done an online search, I then go through all the contents pages (and we're talking about 45 books!) to make sure I haven't missed a more interesting or relevant recipe - I can kind of tell from the title.  The books are tucked into available spaces all over the house, so I can't easily just go to my bookshelf and look for likely books.  SO, time-consuming and a pain.  Titles would be an immense help.

Not sure of programming aspect of this, but I also gladly take just the titles too until ingredients are added at a later date.  I search for recipes using both methods equally ie by recipe name such as "chicken salad"  or by ingredients "chicken, green onions, etc".  Whenever I search for recipes online I always search for recipe names only.  This would add many more unindexed books to the recipe data here. 

Before I knew of EYB, I started a cookbook database in order to not buy books twice or more. It developed to a table of recipes with less atributes then EYB but it was useful for I could search it for recipe title content. When I learned about EYB which was more detailed it was clear that I needded it. Unfortunately I didn't continue with my table of recipes. According to EYB I have 462 books, 198 of them are indexed (cca 43%). But in my Recipetable there are 206 books with recipes.
I would propose an exchange of my recipetable of 206 unindexed books for a table of recipes of 88 indexed books. How is that then?

It seems clear to me that, while clearly the best thing is to have all our books thoroughly indexed the EYB way, there's a good number of us who would benefit from having our books at least partially indexed. 

Most books seems to have an average of around 100 or so recipes, making this a one-hour job per book rather than a multi-day or even multi-month process. I know that I'd happily sign up to this much lighter task for some of the hundred or so unindexed books that I own.

I really do think that this would unlock a lot potentially valuable information for the community. It goes without saying that all members should be able to exclude these lightly indexed books from their search results if they prefer.

Fiona, Jane - could you give some consideration to allowing members to partially index their cookbooks? It would be good for the community to hear your views on this.

I'd propose indexing:

• Author


• Book Title


• Year


• Recipe Titles

Let's unlock all those neglected treasures!

Joesan, it would be indeed nice to "unlock all those treasures" .. but the time it would take for a member to so do really depends on the internet upload speed .. for those of us down in Oz that speed is ridiculously slow - we rank 50th in the world with a general upload speed of around 1.5 mbps ....!! And having taken up a few partially member indexed books to finish off from part started I don't think you'd necessarily get what you expect!

Debkellie - wow, I would never have thought a great economy like Oz would have such slow internet.  Regardless, there are plenty of members out there with faster internet speeds to help out! 

It doesn't seem like the owners of the site read these forums, I'm not sure how we get this onto the agenda. Anyone have any ideas?

joesan - on the contrary we read every post on the Forum every day. We are waiting to get a few opinions before we weigh in ourselves (we don't want to influence the discussion). I have also asked all our staff who are involved with indexing to give me their opinions. What can seem simple to an outsider can be much more complex for the people who actually have to manage it!

I've stayed out of this thread because I don't know enough about the inner workings to know if it is practical. However, I do know that I currently get annoyed by recipes being picked up by title when I am actually looking for ingredient (or vice versa) so I'd like to be able to provide a more refined search argument before partially indexed books was implemented.

I also find it more annoying to have only a portion of my cookbooks available. As an intermediate step, it would be useful to be able to add books by LCCN. But even better would be to allow users to add cookbooks which would require EYB approval to verify that they are not duplicates (see Amazon's 3rd party additions for evidence of how essential this is).

Originally Posted by: mjes

I've stayed out of this thread because I don't know enough about the inner workings to know if it is practical. However, I do know that I currently get annoyed by recipes being picked up by title when I am actually looking for ingredient (or vice versa) so I'd like to be able to provide a more refined search argument before partially indexed books was implemented.

I also find it more annoying to have only a portion of my cookbooks available. As an intermediate step, it would be useful to be able to add books by LCCN. But even better would be to allow users to add cookbooks which would require EYB approval to verify that they are not duplicates (see Amazon's 3rd party additions for evidence of how essential this is).

MJES, I doubt that LCCN (library of congress control number) would work for non-US publications... or does Library of COngress "have everything"???.. just asking for those of us outside of the US... which is quite a large proportion of members ..!

Originally Posted by: Jane

joesan - on the contrary we read every post on the Forum every day. We are waiting to get a few opinions before we weigh in ourselves (we don't want to influence the discussion). I have also asked all our staff who are involved with indexing to give me their opinions. What can seem simple to an outsider can be much more complex for the people who actually have to manage it!

Oh thanks, Jane. Sorry for jumping to the wrong conclusion! Hopefully your consideration will balance the fact that when some people are saying they wouldn't want partial indexes this could very easily dealt with by having a filter against the massive benefit to those that would want it. For me it would unlock over a third of my books. And it seems like similar numbers for other users here.

I stress that I do appreciate the very thorough indexing that many, many of the new books get; it's just that for me, and it would seem others, I have older books or more obscure books that now seem unlikely ever to be fully indexed. Opening up partial indexing to members would seem like a reasonable cost way of greatly improving the uitlity of the site. (Easy for me to say, I know!)

Partial indexing....hmmm...massive benefit?  I dunno.  Joesan has approximately 60% of her books indexed (170 out of 278).  Of her books, 121 have less than 25 EYB members owning.  Of her books, 56 have less than 10 EYB members owning.  

I have been an EYB member sinced 2010.  In fact, I have a lifetime membership as a participant in beta testing.  This platform has been a godsend for my huge collection of cookbooks (and growing...groan).  My foremost benefit has been in bookmarking to find which location, shelf, or bedroom holds which books.  Since I like the special editions of magazines such as Fine Cooking and Eating Well, I am pleased that these publications are now often being indexed.  

For Jane and Fiona, praises to heaven for their prompt and cogent attention to this forum.  My experience of 8 years with EYB gives me a better window into what these women face in allocating software development assets...including to every platform, mobile, Apple, Android, on and on.  Since Joesan has participated only 3 months so far and has strong opinions about what she wants, let's all give a silent cheer to the EYB crew (many, in addition to the founders) for doing their best for the thousands of us who suggest and hope their needs eventually result in new development features. 

I'm with rivergait on this one .. and that's based on taking over partially indexed books to complete.

Originally Posted by: debkellie

MJES, I doubt that LCCN (library of congress control number) would work for non-US publications... or does Library of COngress "have everything"???.. just asking for those of us outside of the US... which is quite a large proportion of members ..!

I agree that LCCN does not completely solve the problem, but it does add another chunck of titles with an already unique identifier similar to the ISBN. This allow it to be implemented with a minimum amount of change to the existing code. I had considered those outside the states which for me practically means I considered South Asia :-)

Originally Posted by: Cati

Why not just use the existing facilities, namely Personal Indexing. Saves using Sydney's time having to review work which might only benefit a very small number of members. Jane, perhaps you could make personal indexing quicker for members if you added the ability to "add previous" to the source.

This seems like a very sensible idea, especially if you have the "add previous" functionality.