I've gotten a few emails and seen at least one forum post with questions about adding new data sources to Tellico. Here's a quick step-by-step tutorial.

First, a few notes on the terminology that Tellico uses. Any type of website, script, or interface that can be used to import data is called a Data Source, and Tellico has many of them. Each Data Source has a type, along with some options (though not all sources have options to set). You can have multiple sources defined that all point to the same place, but with different options. For example, Amazon.com has multiple country-specific sites from which data can searched. The country setting is an option for the Amazon data source. Also, for better or worst, the button labeled Search in the toolbar is used to search those sources and import information into the Tellico collection.

To add a new data source, open the Tellico configuration.

Then, select the Data Sources page.

Click the New... button and change the source type to TheMovieDB.org, for example.

Notice that this data source only has one setting, for an access key. The link in the description points you to the website where you can register for an API key. TheMovieDB.org requires an API key in order to search the site.

After adding the source, now you can search for movie information from TheMovieDB.org. Since that data source only provides information for movies, you can only search it when you have a Video Collection open. Click the Search button and change the source to TheMovieDB.org.

You can also update your existing entries using the data sources, by using the command in the Collection menu or right-clicking.

The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a Digital Library portal for researchers in Astronomy and Physics, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. The ADS maintains three bibliographic databases containing more than 8.6 million records: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Physics, and arXiv e-prints.

In order to search the ADS from Tellico, you can use a script that I just uploaded to kde-files.org. Download the script, and then add a new external data source in Tellico with the settings as shown below. Change the location to wherever you saved the script.

The search returns results in Bibtex format, which means that many of the values are bracketed for inclusion in Latex documents. Tellico does strip those brackets when viewing the entries, but they are saved in the data.

A data source for searching DVDFr.com has been added to Tellico. DVDFr is a French movie site with a nice XML API for performing queries, which made adding the code very simple.

Sites with existing APIs are easy to add as data sources, and I added DVDFr a day after I came across it. If anyone is aware of sites with APIs which are not currently supported in Tellico, please let me know.

Two additional data sources have been added to Tellico. Freebase is a generalized database of just about any structured data anyone can add. Tellico can search Freebase for books, comic books, movies, music, video games, and board games. Open Library is a online book database that aims to have one page for every book ever published.

Both sites return data in the JSON format, so the QJson library is required when compiling. These data sources will be available in Tellico 2.3.

Tellico comes with interfaces for searching a number of data sources, most of which are listed below. Not all of them are enabled by default since they might require registration. In Tellico's settings, select the Data Sources page and add or modify your specific sources there.

Books & Bibliographies

(Registration required.)

(Registration required.)

Spanish Ministry of Culture

Internet Bookshop

(Registration required.)

z39.50 (U.S. Library of Congress, the British Library, the French SUDOC, etc.)

SRU interface (nature.com, JSTOR, etc.)

Movies

(Registration required.)

Music

(Registration required.)

Video Games

(Registration required.)

Board Games

(Registration required.)

Comic Books

(Registration required.)

Wine

(Registration required.)

Multiple Types

(Any GCstar search plugin)

(Any external script or executable that outputs certain formats)

Two new data sources have been added to Tellico. MusicBrainz provides data about music and TheMovieDB provides movie information.

Wine.com recently made available an interface for searching their wine database. As you can see from the screenshot, Tellico will support searching Wine.com in the next release.

Amazon.com has changed their data API to require that all searches be signed with a secret key, unique to each user. Tellico 2.0 for KDE4 supports the new method. However, most older versions (i.e. all versions of Tellico prior to 1.3.6) do not.

A quick backport of the fix was made for Tellico 1.3.6 for KDE3. Most distributions probably won't package it, since they've moved on to KDE4. Find it on the Download Page.