LiDat is an innovative system for managing literature that is suited for personal use as well as administration of lending libraries. LiDat stands out in its extensive support of the features of the Apple Macintosh, making it easy to learn and comfortable to use.

LiDat knows more than 20 kinds of media. E. g., a new title may be entered as a book, a book in a collection, a periodical, a master's thesis, or as a video. In addition to the usual details, articles, books, etc. may be annotated with an arbitrary number of abstracts, excerpts, and cross-references. For this, existing documents like text or pictures may be imported into LiDat. In order to handle the data efficiently, LiDat offers extensive searching features. Among other possibilities, you may search for keywords, for authors, or for words contained in the title.

Additionally, you may search for expressions in annotations! In this way, the search is extended to contents like abstracts or indexes, almost reaching the power of a complete indexed text database.

These searches result in excerpts that may be saved as documents. Excerpts may be printed or exported for use in word processors.

Another powerful feature is the editing of existing excerpts: They may be supplemented, delimited, or combined in various ways, in order to create the most complex queries. You might start a general search for titles in the '80s and - if the result is not specific enough - shrink the search space step by step, eg. to authors whose name starts with a specific letter, or titles that have been assigned a specific keyword.

This may be continued until the result of the search matches your expectations. Of course, multiple criteria for searching may also be combined in a single operation (e. g. works of an author with a specific keyword). Manually editing excerpts is also possible. You may add or remove arbitrary titles to or from the list.

The most interesting possibility of editing excerpts certainly is the logical combination of excerpts: Let's assume you have genera-ted an excerpt of all titles from the '80s that contain the term "influenza". You have already read some books and articles on the subject that you keep in an excerpt document called "Already Read".

Now you want a third excerpt that contains all titles that are contained in the first excerpt, but not the second. This is achieved by combining the first two excerpts:

This combining may be carried out with the logical operators "and", "or", and "but not". Until now, we concentrated on the feature set of LiDat. However, what really sets LiDat apart in daily work with literature is its ease of use. LiDat not only supports PowerTalk for mailing excerpts, but also the new "Macintosh Drag and Drop". It is possible to exchange objects like sections of text, pictures, etc. between programs without having to use "Copy" and "Paste". Just like you always have dragged icons in the Finder to move or copy files from folder to folder, you may now move data from document to document in different programs. To illustrate these possibilities, let's take the addition of annotations to a title: To add an existing text document as an annotation for a title it suffices to drag the document's icon from the Finder to the appropriate field:

The result is a copy of the text document that can be opened directly from the title's window, and may be used in other applications:

In order to use the text in a word processor, you simply drag the selected line into the target documents window, the text will then be inserted automatically:

Quoting works the same way. Simply drag a title from an excerpt into the word processing application -

and the text will immediately appear in your word processing document, complete with all text attributes specified in the chosen quotation format:

If the included quotation formats don't suffice for you, you may define additional formats to comply with even the most unusual conventions. Every media type may be assigned a separate format.

Text attributes may be chosen arbitrarily. Text size, font, etc. may be chosen to your liking - separately for every excerpt, if that is neccessary.

LiDat provides everything you've come to expect of a Macintosh application: Ease of use in combination with high flexibility and a rich set of features. LiDat shows that a clear concept can arrange the management of literature data that used to be confusing in a simply and structured way - so quoting becomes a pleasure.

Overview:

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