Endings/BBTI 2025-12-01 to 2025-12-05
to : Martin Holmes
Minutes: 140
On Monday, attended the first meeting of the BBTI action group attempting to revive, refresh, and expand the BBTI. Then in the afternoon worked on a bug in the staticSearch conversion of v1 to v2 configuration files, which had been caused I believe by changes in another XSLT module on which it depended. Created a PR for JT, and tested the result with BBTI, which worked perfectly.
On Friday, GB provided a download of the MDB database from the London Book Trade project, and I converted it to usable formats -- commands etc. below, for the record, because we’ll inevitably need to do this again:
Install mdb-tools, then:
mdb-tables -1 LBT_2008.mdb | xargs -I{} bash -c 'mdb-export LBT_2008.mdb "$1" > "$1".csv' -- {}
Install gnumeric, then:
ssconvert --merge-to=LDB_2008.ods *.csv
Finally, for sharing with non-LibreOffice users:
ssconvert LBT_2008.ods LBT_2008.xlsx
Then I did a deep dive into the structure and the data of this db, and reported back to the BBTI group on what I had discovered, and how different it is from the BBTI db.