WordSearch Bible Metadata

Working with WordSearch Bible Metadata

Overview

The term metadata refers to data about data. That is to say the description and other information used to describe a book. This includes such things as the title, the author, and other things such as copyright, location where it is stored, and the short description. Each Book in the WordSearch Bible collection has metadata for the book. This can be seen in the library view by right clicking on the title or icon and selecting properties. It is also available in the Resource view.

If the book is actually a set of books, the properties will show the list of books in the set that you own. You will need to click on one of the books in the set to show the metadata for that book.

The Data

One piece of this information allows us to find the book. Look for path to see where the book is stored on your system. If you then use file explorer you can traverse to the location specified in the path. You will find several files in this location and one will have the extension .cbp. This CDP file contains all of the metadata. It is clear tagged text and you can look at it using a text editor. I used Notepad++ for my text editor but the standard notepad shipped with Windows will also work.

The metadata shown on the screen when you look at properties include (from top to bottom):

1. Book title: This data is mandatory. See #Title below
2. Copyright statement: This will always identify WORDsearch as the owner.
3. Author: Show author if known. See #Author below.
4. Prepared by
5. Version: This always begins with 1 and increments with changes and corrections to the book.
6. Language: This data is between <language> and </language>. It is the standard name such as en for English.
7. Printed ISBN
8. Software ISBN - usually blank
9. Category: See WordSearch Bible Categories, The data is between <category> and </category>
10. CBP date: Date of the last change to the .cbp file.
11. DAT date: Date of the last change to the book.
12. Book ID this is a unique WordSearch ID for the book. The first number identifies the source and is follow by a colon. The second a unique number inside the source. WordSearch prepared books will have a source ID of 0. This is shown in the .cbp file as: <bookinfo pubnum="0" booknum="2831" ...> This is an tag that includes the language, the version and other information for the WordSearch program itself. Do not change any of this.
13. Path: This is the full path to the folder contain the book. If the book is moved it will be found so long as it is somewhere in the library folder.
14. Summary: See #Summary below.
15. Permission: Provides permissions to reproduce a portion of the book.

Most of the information shown here comes from the .cbp file. The information may not be in this exact order.

The CDP File

The file is viewable but not necessarily easy to read. It is intended for the computer to read and is in a format called XML. XML is a special markup language used to provide intelligence to the data the computer is reading. For example the title is contained between two tags, one called <title> and one called </title>. This is how the computer recognized the title. Similarly you will see tags all throughout the file identifying various items. This file is intended for computers so it may look odd to humans. It is missing things like the line endings and the data seems all jumbled together. This is ok. The computer would ignore line endings and spaces between lines anyway.

Title

The Title of the book is display in the library view unless this book is part of a Set. You might want to change the Title if you have trouble identifying the book. For example:

• You have more than one book with the same title.
• You want the title to match the one on the web site.
• The title causes you to not be able to find the book.
  • I have two books beginning with 1000, both have the numbers 1000 on the cover but one of them has a title that begins with "One Thousand ..." while the other one has "1000 ..."
  • I purchased a book from called Anecdotes by C.H. Spurgeon. It was filed under C. Guess why.
• The metadata initial display for a Set is to just list the volumes inside the set. Sometimes the original creator took the easy way out and just called them Vol1, Vol2, Vo3, etc. Having more meaningful titles will allow you to find the actual volume you want to look at.
• Often titles begin with "The" or "A" and you may prefer to put that at the end with a comma just ahead to aid in finding the title.
• The name is misspelled, or you just don't like it.

The .cbp file may also contain the official title stored separately in the file under a different tag (<OffTitle>)

Author

Many of the books are missing the authors name. You may be able to do some research and find it. There may not even be the structure in the file to allow adding the author after you find it. There is a sample to show the structure:

<authors><author role="Author" first="Harry A." last="Ironside" suffix=""/></authors>

You can copy this structure into the file and change the contents. It can be any where in the file between the <bookproperties> and the </bookproperties>. There can be more than one author tag inside the authors tag.

Note that the web site may show and author and then when you get the book the author is reported as none. The likely cause of this problem is that the Author in the .cbp file is identified with a role of editor. This will prevent the name being displayed in the Resources menu and will also prevent this from showing up when you try and filter for the name in the Library screen or on the Resource menu. Currently the only fix is to also add the editor as the author here in this file.

Summary

One of the things I like to see is the summary which describes the contents of the book. Often, the title is not enough to tell me about the book. Unfortunately many of the titles in my library are missing the summary. Here is how to add a summary:

Open the correct .cbp file in your text editor and search for the word summary. It will be contained between a < and > and looks like <summary></summary> for a book that is missing the summary. All you need to do is place your cursor in between the > and < and begin type the text you want for the summary. You could also look inside the book itself and copy out some appropriate text. The preface often has a good description. Do not worry about hitting the Enter key or try making paragraphs. Just enter the text. Save the file and the next time you look at the book properties the data you entered will be seen.

Paragraphs

The method shown above under #Summary will work fine for a single paragraph entry in any field, which is usually perfectly fine for a summary. However, sometimes multiple paragraphs or other special formatting is desired for a summary or other section with bigger entries. The cbp file supports XHTML constructions but they have to be hidden from the initial XML content. This is done by hiding the "<" and perhaps ">" from the XML parser. This will effectively hide the tags themselves. The XML parser will convert these characters to their true symbol which will then get interpreted by the XHTML parser which drives the actual display. For most things you need only to hide the & character and the < character. To due this use: &amp; and &lt;. For symmetry you can also code the &gt; sign (>). Thus the paragraph tag become &lt;p&gt; and of course you will also need the closing tag &lt;/p&gt;

Tips

1. Don't worry if you mess up the file somehow. If you redownload the book it will be replaced and you can start over.
2. The bad news is that tip one is true also if the book gets updated. You may want to keep a copy of your changes somewhere safe.
3. Much of the data in this file is cached by the program while it is running. To see a change you have made you might need to use the "Refresh Library" command and wait for the refresh.
4. Don't use an < characters or & characters in the stuff you type in. (Use &lt; for < and &amp; for & if you need those characters.)
5. If you see a misspelling or error in some other field in the document you can correct it. You can even fix the title for example.
6. There are things in the .cbp file that are not shown when you use the properties menu choice. You may find some of them useful such as the original copyright date or the official title or subtitle, or perhaps the editor.
7. The tags in the file can be anywhere inside the file but be careful to ensure that the nesting of one tag inside another remains intact. All tags are nested inside <bookproperties> which must be maintained.

There are more advanced things you can do in this file which will be added later.