Shelves: your own lists, across any catalog

A shelf is a list you put together yourself and hand to other people. Signed firsts. Every poster from the 1998 tour. The pressings you are still missing. It gets its own page and its own link, and you decide what goes on it and in what order.

A shelf holds entries, not copies

Your collection is made of copies — the objects you own, each with its condition, its location and what you paid. A shelf points at the shared catalog entry instead: the edition, the release, the poster, the film, the company. Nothing from a copy ever shows on a shelf.

Two things follow. You can shelve what you have never owned — a checklist of a run you are hunting, the full set of a comic where you have four issues. And because the page reads nothing from your collection, a shelf can be public while your collection stays private. The copies are the other half of this: collections and wantlists.

One shelf can also mix catalogs. A shelf about one band can hold its posters, the live concert disc and the book about the tour — the only place on ctlgs where entries from different catalogs sit side by side.

Putting something on one

Every entry page carries a + Shelf link, beside the buttons that add a copy. Open it and you get your own shelves, ticked where they already hold this entry, plus a box to type a new shelf name and file the entry onto it in the same click. A new shelf is published from the moment you make it.

That link is on every kind of entry, not only the ones you can own a copy of. A credit, a venue, a publisher, a platform, a film — if it has a page it can go on a shelf, so a shelf of cover artists or of venues is a normal thing to build.

Entries go on one at a time: there is no way to shelve a batch, so a long shelf is a long sitting at the keyboard.

Order, notes and the two views

On your own shelf there is a pencil, and it opens edit mode: drag handles, a note box under every entry, a tick to take one off. One Save writes the lot — the name, the description, the order you dragged things into, every note, every removal. Nothing there writes on its own, so leaving without saving changes nothing.

The notes are what make a shelf read like something rather than a wall of covers: the date and venue under a poster, the printing details under an edition, or just why the thing is on the list.

A shelf shows as a grid of images or as a list with a line of text per entry. Your choice is kept on the shelf; a visitor can flip it for themselves by putting ?view=list or ?view=grid on the end of the URL.

Shelf pages don't paginate, so a very long one gets tiring to read. Around a hundred entries works well; past that, split it by year, label or tour.

Published, or kept back as a draft

Shelves are published by default, because the point of one is to be seen. Turn publishing off and the shelf is your own draft: you see it with a banner saying nobody else can, everyone else gets a plain 404, and it is left out of every list of shelves. That is the only privacy setting a shelf has — no halfway state.

The URL is /shelf/{name}-{number}, with no username in it, because a shelf is usually shared on its own rather than found through a profile. The number is what resolves the page, so renaming a shelf keeps every link anyone ever shared. A published shelf has a Copy link button for exactly that reason.

Where shelves turn up

Yours are gathered in a Shelves section on your profile, where the user menu's Shelves link goes. Each shows its name, its description and how many entries it holds, and you can drag the set into the order you want them read.

It works the other way too: an entry page lists the shelves holding it and whose they are, so you can see where other people filed what you are looking at. One entry can sit on as many shelves as you like.

There are already shelves built from the old Metaogs data, on an account called Archivist — Pearl Jam posters year by year, most-collected and most-wanted lists for several catalogs, and a run of grails. The gigposters ones go deepest, and they are a fair picture of what the format is good for.

What a shelf is not

A shelf is not where the object physically sits. That is the copy's location field, owner-only and never shown to anyone else. Calling a shelf "Loft, box 3" would put the contents of that box in front of everyone.

Nor is a shelf a wantlist, though it can look like one. A want counts you on the entry, next to the people who own one; a shelf says only that you grouped these things together. If the underlying idea — the object, then your copy of it — is still fuzzy, start with what you own, down to the copy.