<n>This article is written in response to a couple of incredulous emails I received about my recent publication of a <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=1911">handbook</a> for the <i>Book Library</i>, which seemed like a lot of work documenting an application in use by two people, with no hopes of ever being used by more.</n> <hr> The <i>Book Library</i> as it is today is a Windows-only application built with <a href="http://www.opus.ch/index.php?id=atlas">Atlas</a>, a Borland Delphi-based framework available from <a href="http://opus.ch/">Opus Software AG</a>. I used to work at Opus, and the <i>Book Library</i> is the application I wrote to get a feel for how Atlas was to use "in the real world" -- I believe a lot of the improvements in Atlas 2.5 stemmed from that work. :-) At the same time, I included an XML-importer for an old, crappy Access database I wrote a <i>looooonnnng</i> time ago, back in NYC when I barely knew a database from a hole in the ground. Using the importer, I managed to get most of my well-documented book library into the new, shiny application with no data entry. Having nearly 800 books documented and cross-indexed is a pretty big inertia that prevents me from moving to some online solution or some other software (like the fancy-looking <a href="http://www.delicious-monster.com/">Delicious Library 2</a>). Data-entry in the current version is a snap and it does what it needs to. Shortly after I wrote the <i>Book Library</i>, I finally had had enough of watching my mother enter her data into a "database"<fn>, so I wrote an importer for that too---a highly-customized work of art, it turns out---and there her data sits to this day. She nodded happily as I showed her the new application, then forgot all about it for a couple of years, continuing to add to the old database. I discovered that this summer and resolved to attack the problem of migrating her to a new application with extensive documentation; thus, the experiment I wrote recently (the aforementioned <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=1911"><i>Book Library</i> handbook</a>). I was also happy to discover that my self from 2005 had an inkling that this would happen and I'd written not just an importer, but a <i>sync</i> that ignored duplicates. Oh frabjous day! I could re-import her data without changing a line of code! So, I sent her the handbook and the new database, with my fingers crossed. So, that's the reason there's such a detailed handbook and also the reason the <i>Book Library</i> is not available for download: because it's written with proprietary <a href="http://opus.ch">Opus</a> technology for which I no longer have a de-facto commercial developer's license. <a href="http://www.opus.ch/index.php?id=atlas">Atlas</a>, however, is just the latest skin to wrap this data, some of which, as mentioned in the footnote, is two decades old. The plan, of course, is to rebuild it with <a href="http://encodo.ch/en/quino.php">Quino</a>, a C#-framework I helped develop at my company, <a href="http://encodo.com/">Encodo Systems</a>. Quino is actually more than ready to go for replicating the Windows application, but ... you know ... the web's <i>sooooo</i> cool these days and Quino web-support is getting there as well. The <i>Book Library</i> waited twenty years; it can wait a little while longer. <hr> <ft>You don't even really want to know ... it's latest incarnation was in Access, but the schema started life as a Lotus Symphony database at least two decades ago ... oh, the horror.</ft>