We’re coming up to the first anniversary of the BNC CataList launch, and to celebrate we launched CataList version 2.0. This one goes out to the legions of devoted CataList users who have taken the time to share their thoughts and ideas on how CataList could be improved.
This release included a number of user-requested features and functions. The full details on how to use all these new features can be found on our What’s New in BNC CataList page, but here’s a brief recap of the new features that are available on the site today.
Customizable Export Grids
Retailers and libraries—this one’s for you. But publishers, sales agents, wholesalers—we’ll let you use this new function too. Account managers can now select which columns should be included in the grids exported by users on their account, and they can set the column order. And yes, notes can now be exported. Even better, there are three new editable columns which will allow retailers to enter their own store merchandising categories, publisher ID numbers and format codes.
Not interested in doing all this custom setup? We’ve also built two pre-set formats, a basic and an extended export, that you can easily select with the click of a button.
Social Media Integration
Tweet, Like, +1, Add to Shelf… now CataList users can share information about the books on CataList to their favourite social sites. Social media buttons have been added below the cover image for all books in CataList, and we’ve moved the email and PDF buttons in-line with these social sharing buttons.
We’ve also added follow buttons that publishers can post to their Publisher page. Just provide your Twitter handle, your YouTube channel or Facebook fan page, and CataList will add the buttons—you can see we’ve added them already on BookNet Canada’s CataList page. (We’d love it if you followed us!)
Upgrades to the CataList SalesData Report
Here’s a little more love for our SalesData retailers. Now when these retailers view the SalesData report in CataList, we will return the All Market data that all SalesData subscribers see, plus these retailers will now also see their own store sales and their peer group sales if they belong to a peer-sharing group. For those subscribing publishers with peer view arrangements, we’re working on your report in a future release.
Toggling Between Formatted Text and HTML Views
Publishers can now toggle between two views of their manually edited text on the Edit Title page. Admittedly this isn’t the flashiest feature, but it serves two important purposes. To start, there aren’t a lot of formatting options available in the existing visual editor. This new functionality will give catalogue editors an easy way to add links or use other formatting tags directly in the HTML view so they can get the desired formatting for their descriptive text.
Secondly, one of the easiest ways to get data into CataList when you are making a manual change is to copy and paste the new text into the appropriate section of the Edit Title page. If you are copying that text from a PDF document or web page, sometimes formatting tags are unintentionally picked up along with the text, and that can affect the layout of your CataList pages. This feature will now allow you to view the full HTML version and clear out any unwanted tags that may have inadvertently been dropped in.
Let us know what you think of the new features, and keep those requests coming in.
