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Discussion on: Hacktoberfest 2020 β€” Who's looking for contributors?

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Benito van der Zander

My πŸ“š library app always needs help. It shows the books you have borrowed from public libraries, so the only way to use it is to physically travel to the library. Since I live in Germany, it mostly has German libraries

There are many tasks. For example:

  • Check that it works with the libraries in your city or add them. I cannot do that, since I cannot travel that far

  • Check that all the other library urls and parameters are still correct. Since the app syncs itself with the library website, and time the library has a new webpage, the url need to be updated

  • Translate the remaining Android Java code to Kotlin

  • Translate the Linux/Windows GUI from German to English or other languages

  • Ask the librarians what they think about it. I have tried to send them emails, but they only respond by asking for my library card number and refuse to respond unless I get a card from them in person

The main repo is on SourceForge, but there is a github mirror:

GitHub logo benibela / videlibri

πŸ“š Cross-platform library client to access any OPAC and library catalog from your local device, e.g. for renewing of all lend books or searching for other books available in the library.

VideLibri πŸ“š Build Status hg

VideLibri is a library client to access all the features of a (public) library catalog/OPAC and store the catalog data for further offline processing. It can

  • view your borrowed books,
  • renew your borrowed books to extend the lending period,
  • renew the books automatically when ever the due date is close,
  • warn about the due date before the books need to be returned,
  • keep a history of all ever borrowed books to track your reading habits,
  • search your borrowed books with Turing-complete XQuery queries,
  • export the borrowed books as BibTeX/XML,
  • search the catalog,
  • order books from the catalog,
  • do many more things

VideLibri is platform-independent and currently provides binaries for (Desktop) Windows, Linux and Android. So far VideLibri has been tested with 200 libraries successfully, where we have noticed the library using one of the supported library systems, but it can be used with every library using one of…