Searching by date of entry?

I have been trying to search my catalogue by date of entry-but nothing I try seems to work. Advanced search claims you can do this, but does anyone kn ow how?

I think that 'date' in Advanced Search refers to the 'date' of the books, not to the acquired, started or ended dates.

Agreed with GreyHead although I also think it doesn't refer to entry date (which is different from the other three). You can sort by entry date and try jumping to the area you are looking for but that's about the best you can do.

Another agreed that I think it's the book year date.
Usually populated from the source on import but can be easily edited in the usual edit mode. Usual format is the 4numbers only. (eg 2007)

I can advanced search for
date: 2006 etc but get errors in big red script if I try searching by any other date format (eg 03/05/2007).. I don't think it likes the / .

I never found a way to do this, so I sort my catalog by entry date and try to find the right page in the sorted list. At the moment I have only 16 pages, so four peeks gets me there.

Why is it difficult to add this as a fielded search? It would be very nice, for example, at the end of the year to be able to see the books that you read in that year.

>6 reannon: Well 'entry date' does not necessarily correlate with 'books read this year' -- unless you enter only books you've read and right after you've read them. But it's more likely you read last month a book you entered five years ago, and entered last week a book you haven't read yet.

You can see exactly what you've entered on LT in the last calendar year by sorting on the entry date column. And you can make a list of sorts by using Power Edit to assign a tag to all entries back to Jan 1 2014 -- then you have a separate list of this year's books.

Btw, by 'you' I of course mean 'one' and not you personally -- but I didn't feel like rewriting the above to clarify that.

There's no great solution, as others have noted, but there is a workaround (that I stumbled across while experiencing the same frustration as you!).

You can export your LibraryThing catalog as a database file (it supports Excel, tab-delimited, and some other formats). The export function allows you to search or filter the catalog by keywords, tags, collections, and "since entry date". Thus you can save a file containing only books entered after a given date, and open it in a database program or other cataloging program. (It does not allow searches for books entered *before* a given date, or between two dates. You could do a double-workaround by exporting the entire catalog to Excel and then performing your search, which is absurd but it would work.)

The export function can be found by clicking the "More" tab on the main menu bar, then clicking the blue "Import/Export" link on the left sidebar.

It is really frustrating that LT doesn't seem to care about this need, which arises for many reasons (particularly when entering and organizing the collection - you often want to look at entries from a certain time, to continue your work on them). But if you need it badly enough, you can find a way!

Good luck.

I've never searched by entry date, but you can definitely sort by entry date, which is good enough if you need recently added books. In case it is helpful ...

>8 ktkeith: I do exactly the double-workaround. So I have a script, that exports the Excel file and after some time prints

...
- - ten latest - -
179602275 OR 179609865 OR 179751801 OR 180804507 OR 180892756 OR 181705881 OR 181996422 OR 182080428 OR 182439928 OR 182883125
...

Entering 179602275 OR 179609865 OR 179751801 OR 180804507 OR 180892756 OR 181705881 OR 181996422 OR 182080428 OR 182439928 OR 182883125 in the search field then gives me the ten latest additions in catalogue view.
Very useful for finding errors or omissions in the latest additions.

Here's another vote for searching by date entered. This is a pretty common search need I have. Exporting to a file and searching is fine, but it doesn't allow you to make any modifications to your database based on that search (applying tags, for instance).

The workaround bnielson suggests (generate a list of LTID numbers to search) works if the list of matching books is fairly small, but is limited by the maximum URL size (2048), but with an LTID that is 9 characters long plus 4 characters for the " OR " so any search that results in more than about 150 matches will fail. Since I typically enter about 200 books in a session, that's a bit of a problem.