Category: BookBrainz

GSoC 2023: Reviving the BookBrainz importer project

Hi, I am David Kellner (aka kellnerd), an electrical engineering student from Germany, who has finally found the time to participate in Summer of Code after four years of contributing data, bug reports and a bit of code to MetaBrainz projects (mostly to MusicBrainz and related tools such as userscripts).

Although I had mostly worked with MusicBrainz so far, I decided to apply for the BookBrainz importer project as I was already familiar with the underlying JavaScript technology and saw the huge potential of the idea to transform and import external datasets into the cleverly designed BookBrainz database schema. My proposed project was accepted by the MetaBrainz team and I have been working on it for the last six months under the mentorship of monkey.

This post gives an overview about my GSoC project and the challenges which I encountered during this summer.

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GSoC’23: Administration System for BookBrainz

Namaste!

I am Shivam Awasthi, a recent graduate from IIT(BHU), Varanasi. As part of Google Summer of Code’23, I participated as a contributor for the MetaBrainz Foundation, where I worked on creating an Administration System for BookBrainz.

During this period, I was mentored by monkey, and ansh. With this post, I’ll be giving an overview of my project.

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Style Guideline Updates

If you’ve been lurking on our forums, you will know that our style guidelines have been receiving lots of attention lately! Both MusicBrainz docs and BookBrainz docs have been getting new additions and updates, and there’s still plenty being discussed. As I type these very words, there are greased-up editors in what’s known to us only as “the pit” – pitting their words, experience, and muscular bodies against each other in a bid for dominance over typographical punctuation.

Okay, okay, so there’s not really a pit, but here’s a rundown of some of the style discussions that are taking place, or have taken place, this year:

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MetaBrainz Summit 2022

The silliest, and thus best, group photo from the summit. Left to right: Aerozol, Monkey, Mayhem, Atj, lucifer (laptop), yvanzo, alastairp, Bitmap, Zas, akshaaatt

After a two-year break, in-person summits made their grand return in 2022! Contributors from all corners of the globe visited the Barcelona HQ to eat delicious local food, sample Monkey and alastairp’s beer, marvel at the architecture, try Mayhem’s cocktail robot, savour New Zealand and Irish chocolates, munch on delicious Indian snacks, and learn about the excellent Spanish culture of sleeping in. As well as, believe it or not, getting “work” done – recapping the last year, and planning, discussing, and getting excited about the future of MetaBrainz and its projects.

We also had some of the team join us via Stream; Freso (who also coordinated all the streaming and recording), reosarevok, lucifer, rdswift, and many others who popped in. Thank you for patiently waiting while we ranted and when we didn’t notice you had your hand up. lucifer – who wasn’t able to come in person because of bullshit Visa rejections – we will definitely see you next year!

A summary of the topics covered follows. The more intrepid historians among you can see full event details on the wiki page, read the minutes, look at the photo gallery, and watch the summit recordings on YouTube: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3

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GSoC’22: CritiqueBrainz reviews for BookBrainz entities

Greetings, Everyone!

I am Ansh Goyal (ansh on IRC), an undergraduate student from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India. This summer, I participated in Google Summer of Code and introduced a new feature, CritiqueBrainz reviews for BookBrainz entities.

I was mentored by Alastair Porter (alastairp on IRC) and Nicolas Pelletier (monkey on IRC) during this period. This post summarizes my contributions made for this project and my experiences throughout the journey.

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GSoC 2021: Series Entity for BookBrainz

Hi everyone, I am Akash Gupta, currently pursuing my undergraduate from Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology. This summer, I participated in Google Summer of Code and developed a new feature — Series Entity— for the project BookBrainz.

I was mentored by Nicolas Pelletier (monkey on IRC) during this period. This post summarizes my contributions to the project and the experiences that I had throughout the summer.

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GSoC 2020: User Collection for BookBrainz

Hi everyone, I am Prabal Singh currently studying in Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. This summer I participated in Google Summer of Code and developed a new feature – User Collections – for the project BookBrainz.

I was mentored by Nicolas Pelletier (Mr_Monkey on IRC) during this period. This post summarizes my contributions to the project.

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Introducing the BookBrainz merging tool

Today we come with a big BookBrainz website update that allows you to merge duplicate entities!

Being able to clean up the database is an essential step towards importing public bibliographic records and catalogs from partner websites. As with MusicBrainz, you can visit an entity page on BookBrainz and click on a button to add an entity to a merge queue. You can merge multiple entities in one go easily.

BookBrainz merge queue

After clicking the merge button you will be presented with a page that lets you review and select the correct information in case of conflicting data. The revision history of merged entities is preserved, and in the near future you’ll be able undo merges.

BookBrainz merge page

Your feedback is very welcome! We also have a short tutorial on how to use the new merge tool for the curious.

This latest website update also adds annotations for any information that does not fit into the existing format, some small design improvements and bug fixes.

We’ve also added the ability to search for users on the search page. This last feature will come in handy soon as we introduce collaborative User Collections; stay tuned!

GSoC 2019: JSON Web API for BookBrainz

The time has come to wrap up the very productive and learning summer of the last 3 months as a GSoC student with MetaBrainz.

Hello Everyone!!

I am Akhilesh Kumar, a recent graduate from the National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur, India. I have been working on BookBrainz for MetaBrainz Foundation Inc. as a participant in the Google Summer of Code ’19. It has been an amazing experience and I’ve learned a lot over the summer. I was mentored by Nicolas Pelletier (Mr_Monkey on IRC) during this period. This post summarizes my contributions to the project and the experiences that I had throughout the summer.

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BookBrainz is now an official MetaBrainz project!

After many years as a community driven project and often under-staffed, the BookBrainz project has always been the red-headed step child of our projects. A few weeks ago I asked if the community felt that we should make BookBrainz an official project of the foundation and got a very positive response.

After that, we started informally seeking developers to take on this position, leading to the hire of Monkey, who will now be the lead of the BookBrainz project, taking over for Ben Ockmore. Ben will take on a contributor role to BookBrainz going forward and remain on the project! Thanks for all of your hard efforts in the past, Ben!

While Monkey comes up to speed on the codebase, we’ve been brainstorming what features he should focus on first . The short term focus on BookBrainz will be on bringing it into our hosting setup at Hetzner, which means making the codebase ready for running inside of docker with all of the MetaBrainz specific hosting quirks. Part of this project will be to remove elastic search and to utilize our new Solr based search system that we recently released for MusicBrainz.

After getting BookBrainz moved to our hosting facility that focus will be to create a minimally viable product. What exactly does this mean? One of the frequent complaints I’ve received about BookBrainz is that it is missing core functionality of a proper metadata project. Core functionality means that a user should be able to view and edit all of the metadata that is in BookBrainz and then retrieve this data from the BookBrainz API. It should include full data dumps with incremental data dumps being added a bit later.

What do you think the missing core features of BookBrainz are?

Finally, we’re in discussions with the OpenLibrary team, wondering how to best work together and not to duplicate efforts — we’ll post more about this once we’ve reached an agreement with the OpenLibrary team on how we should proceed.

Thanks!