Manufacturers have many names among the different media types. Related to books they are called publishers, or at Music they are called label, etc. Meganizer reflects those differents at the specific medium edit dialog. But basically, those differences are not used at all. Therefore you can choose a specific label as a publisher without reenter all the data and vice versa and the reusage of manufacturers is very easy and fast. To learn how you can edit manufacturers, see section 4.7.2.
Related to MINs, manufacturers may be identified by a special part of the MIN. This is not possible for all types of MINs, but the most important one, the EAN, allows it. To illustrate such a relation, have a look at the following EANs of one manufacturer.
9783404156856
9783404123544
9783785722565
9783404616138
9783404150717
With help of those numbers, it is quite obvious, that the manufacturer can be at least identified by 9783404 (since 9783 is the combination for books in germany). If Meganizer knows those relation, it can assign all newly added books with EANs starting with 9783404 to the already known manufacturer. To calculate such a relation Meganizer must know at least to different media of the same manufacturer. The calculation is started automatically after you have added a new medium. You can also start it manually with a click on Check Manufacturers at the Edit menu. Those results are stored at the local database. Afterwards Meganizer tries to detect the manufacturer with help of the MIN of the new medium and chooses the correct one automatically, if possible. With help of this process, the adding of new media is already speeded up significantly and no external data is used. But the big disadvantage is, that every user of Meganizer must add some media of a manufacturer before he can calculate the relation and must than add other media to benefit from these efforts. Another big disadvantage is, that every user must add the data of the manufacturer by itself.
To solve those issues, Meganizer supports also the usage of an external database of manufacturers and their relation to MIN ranges. It contacts the server with the entered MIN and gets back a list of possible Manufacturers with all their data. The user can than use or change this data as he likes. The server is also used at the edit dialog of manufacturers, if a new manufacturer is added. But to provide those central database, the relation between manufacturers and MINs must be known. Therefore Meganizer asks you to send your calculated relations to the central database. The send data does not contain any private information. Just the data of the manufacturer and the related MIN part (No complete MIN at all is send, e.g. only 9783404 is send). After sending the data, we review it and add the data to the server. Afterwards every other user benefits from those data. Please be aware, that sending your data to the central database is needed to fetch those data within Meganizer and takes the advantages described above (The locally stored relations are used in any case). You can also access the server via browser at http://mins.engsas.de.