Please display authors

[jabaron 12]

In the display for a notebook, it would be very helpful to display the authors in addition to the title, dates, size, etc. This would enable sorting on author and ease searching for a particular note.

[PinkElephant 8,188]

How many authors do you have ?

[Mike P 2,677]

3 minutes ago, jabaron said:

In the display for a notebook, it would be very helpful to display the authors in addition to the title, dates, size, etc. This would enable sorting on author and ease searching for a particular note.

For the record you can already display "Updated by" and "Created by" in the side list or top list view. I'm still unclear as to how they relate to the "Author" in the note information panel.

[jabaron 12]

In my work, i need to archive articles and websites from the medical literature. I have more than 47,000 different "notes" (the majority pdf's)-- from thousands of authors. I'm guessing I have articles or websites from at least 20,000 different authors.

[PinkElephant 8,188]

The authors as writer of a piece of web text is not available on EN. I even doubt it could be - I doubt there is a common standard for it, given a scientific work can have a huge number of (co-)authors.

When material is clipped, the original URL is saved. This is as close as you get to the author.

[jabaron 12]

I didn't expect suthorsip to be extracted from websites..... The older versions of EN allowed for (manual) entry of author when notes were created, just as titles needed to be entered. Then, of course, there could be sorting and display of authors, just as for titles. Is there a reason why this could not be done for the current version of EN?

[PinkElephant 8,188]

You can write the author anywhere into the note.

The author field in metadata is under system control, and holds the author of the note itself.

We occasionally have this debate about using metadata fields for private uses. Legacy was open on that, and this was used in creative ways. I think it was always a risky manipulation to use fields under system control to store my own information.

It might be a good idea to check by a little test if that „author“ entry into the metadata field will be overwritten in v10, for example when changing a note. In that case you need to extract this information before it is corrupted by using the app.

[Mike P 2,677]

11 hours ago, jabaron said:

In my work, i need to archive articles and websites from the medical literature. I have more than 47,000 different "notes" (the majority pdf's)-- from thousands of authors. I'm guessing I have articles or websites from at least 20,000 different authors.

There are dedicated apps that allow you to do this sort of thing. Using Evernote for something it was not really designed for (and many of us do this) is always going to entail compromise and possibly EN deciding to change something which means our hacks no longer work.

 

10 hours ago, jabaron said:

The older versions of EN allowed for (manual) entry of author when notes were created

You can still change the author from your name (which is how EN intends it to be used) to whatever you like. You cannot change "created by" or "updated by" (see above) so don't be surprised if the author field is removed sometime in the future.

You can search for the author using

author:"Joe Blogs"
or
author:Joe*

but you can't display it in the top list or side list views. 

If you want to get very hacky you could add the author to the url field (copy the note url into the body of the note first) and that allows you to display in in the list views , but not to sort by it. The fact that you can only sort by a fairly limited number of fields is a long standing complaint in these forums.  I don't believe you can search for the contents of the note url field either.

If I was starting from scratch and had to use Evernote, I might be tempted to use a tag for each author. That allows you to have multiple authors for each note and use the power of tag searching. There is a hard limit of 100,000 tags but that is probably OK. I suspect thouigh that the whole system would become unwieldy.

 

 

[jabaron 12]

Why would EN want to remove the author field? That would degrade the archive quite a bit. It should be easy to allow sorting on the author field. I wonder why EN is reluctant to put that in.

[PinkElephant 8,188]

The author is the author of the note.

And that's it, the field is under system control and can't be edited.

You probably have stored another information in this field, which is a misuse. What can happen any time is that the system starts to overwrite this field. You had your "author" information edited into it, and once you opened and edited the note, on closing it writes your name into it instead of what had been.

I don't say this will happen, but I say it may happen, at any time, without a notice - because the field always was under system control. It was just that legacy allowed it to be edited that causes this confusion. You can take that risk, or you avoid it by extracting the current "author" information and write it into the notes body.

[jabaron 12]

WE must be refering to different fields. I've edited the author fields for thousands of notes.

[Mike P 2,677]

If EN didn't want to allow you to edit the author field then it wouldn't be aditable! The "Updated by" and "Created by" fields are not editable and not even in the note information panel. It seems that these are the fileds that give true traceability as to who has changed the note. I have no idea whether these fields existed before V10.