Librarian basics
To use Librarian, you'd first identify the database that you need to work with and highlight it on the Notes workspace. Click on the Librarian icon and the Librarian utility loads.

The main Librarian screen is divided into two sections, as shown in Figure A. The left side of the screen displays one or more design templates that act as source code libraries and the righthand side displays the design of the currently selected database. If needed, you can also have the bottom of the screen act as a preview pane for one of the two sections or display the output from Librarian's log of recent actions.

FIGURE A


This is the main Librarian interface. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The system allows for very easy navigation of the Notes design container. Similar to NotesPeek from Lotus Development (found at http://www.notes.net/sandbox.nsf/e26da15be91bde91852566f0006941d9/818a3e380fe328c6852567370054b33e/$FILE/np15r4n.zip), Librarian presents the Notes database design hierarchy in a tree design that allows you to browse the various elements that make up the design for your database.

How Librarian can help you
The most important (and handiest!) thing that Librarian does is allow you to drag design elements from one or more design libraries and drop them into a target database. Simple, but helpful.

Because Notes elements can be nested (a form can contain multiple subforms or use database scripts), Librarian allows you to highlight a given design element and determine all the other components necessary to support that design element. The result of this scan displays the dependent elements, they could then be copied to the clipboard as a group and pasted into the target database in a single operation.

Librarian also contains the ability to filter design elements of a database. Filtering allows you to locate design elements that contain some word, phrase or string of characters within the name of the object. This would be helpful if you needed to search for design elements that contain 'web', for example, so that they could be copied to the target database. An example of this type of search is shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B


Librarian can display only the elements that meet a filter criteria. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Easily delete Help Using or Help About documents
Also very handy, I've noticed that Librarian allows you to do something not easily accomplished within Notes: remove the Help Using or Help About documents from a database. If you've ever wanted to completely remove one of these documents from a database, you know that you can easily delete the contents of the documents but removing the documents themselves is somewhat harder. With Librarian, you just highlight the undesired design elements in the database pane and press Delete.

What could be better about Librarian?
The version of Librarian that we were sent for review (1.00.00) only allows a single database to be open in the right database pane. This means that if you were working with multiple target databases, you'd have to make multiple sets of copies from the libraries into each of the targets.