Member: bientrey

Not mad at you personally and I hope I have not offended you.
Not at all. Glad to have you here and contributing!

I was a little cranky (actually pissed) that data had been removed from my records without prior notification.
Sorry about that -- I did post my request for someone to send you a message as soon as I noticed how much you'd been doing. I knew that it wasn't lost forever, so didn't feel bad about removing it, but didn't consider that you wouldn't know how to view the history to see what data you had entered.

Unrelated to my misuse of the field, but related to Series information in general -- As a cataloger by profession, I would like to see a non CK, unique field for real series, as identified by LC or the British Library, i.e. Blackwell history of the ancient world or Approaching the ancient world, as examples. Something separate from the fan based identification of series. I'm a fan of various genres myself and understand the urge for assigning series names from that vantage point. Want to see some sort of differentiation between the two.

I've often asked for a series field on the Edit Book page, which is per-user data. I would like it so that I could match my LibraryThing catalog to the order on my shelves - I sort series together, by order within the series. For now, I put the series name before the title when I'm entering a book, so that they sort the way I want. Not the way I'd prefer to do it, but it works for me. But the CK series is what it is, and is useful in its own way.

I've just noticed that the Commmon Knowledge help page doesn't mention series at all, so I've copied the description from the series page. (It doesn't seem right that you don't get the explanation of what a series is until you've created one and clicked on the link. Many people don't even realize that CK entries *are* links.)

posted by r.orrison at 5:41 am (EST) on Mar 8, 2010

Thanks again for your patience and willingness to help a fledgling along.

You're welcome - no problem.

It can be frustrating if your data disappears with no explanation (which is why I like to give people a heads-up if I see it is going to happen).

For future reference - I recalled after I left that last comment that there is another way for you to see the information that was previously in a field (and who exactly removed it). If you go to one of your books that had the series information removed:
http://www.librarything.com/work/795434/book/53969377
and scroll down to the CK section (I don't know how far down you have this placed - these modules are moveable) you can click the "view history" button and see the CK page:
http://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/changelog.php?item=795434&type=1
- you can see that you actually added the info twice and it was removed by two different people.

Incidentally - if you are actually ordering books in a series you put the order in parentheses (if you just type it out like you had it - each entry will show as a separate series). An example of this would be your book:
http://www.librarything.com/work/551635/book/53846515
going to the series page shows you all the books in the series with a check next to the ones you have:
http://www.librarything.com/series/Daily%20Life%20Through%20History%20%281998%29
(this may be a bad example because it is just ordered by year - but you get the drift).

posted by PortiaLong at 12:45 am (EST) on Mar 8, 2010

Is there a way I can address the anal retentive enforcers of the ck fields directly?

Yes...I looked at your library and made my comment after it was brought up in this thread in the Series group:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/73046#1838141
- which you are welcome to post in.

I would caution you that it may not have been one of the posters in that thread who deleted your information and, if it was, they will likely feel entirely justified in doing so. A lot of us volunteer many hours a day cleaning up various aspects of LT for the benefit of the community as a whole (I, personally, am usually more involved in the Combiners! group than the Series group but I imagine the culture is the same) - we can tend to get a little protective/defensive when our - *grin* - "anal-retentive enforcement" is not appreciated.

posted by PortiaLong at 11:07 pm (EST) on Mar 7, 2010

It wasn't me, but it wouldn't be unusual if someone from the series group noticed that someone was creating "illegal" series to remove that information. There are a number of members who probably regularly check the New Series page:
http://www.librarything.com/series looking for errant entries to clean up (or it could be that someone else was entering their Ballantine books right behind you and erasing as they went).

Perhaps you can reconstruct the information to put it in a different field by looking at your CK history page:
http://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/search.php?q=bientrey&f=username...

posted by PortiaLong at 10:13 pm (EST) on Mar 7, 2010

Thanks for the heads up.

No problem - I just didn't want you to go to a lot of work entering the info only to have someone else come along and delete it. If it were me - and I am thinking of doing this with my Ace-Doubles - I would create a collection for each publisher's series (Avon, Dell, Ballantine, etc) and then use tags for the number. Then if I wanted to see which ones I had in the publisher's series I would go to that collection (select from the drop down) and sort by tags. (Which you can do by clicking on the "tags" column header in the "Your Books" list view).

This is becoming a most frustrating exercise.

I'm sorry that you are frustrated - LT is really a wonderful site and there is a LOT of functionality but sometimes it can be overwhelming. If you have questions as to how to accomplish one of your cataloging goals feel free to leave a comment on my profile or post in one of the standing groups (like Site Talk: http://www.librarything.com/groups/sitetalk )

Happy Reading!

posted by PortiaLong at 7:20 pm (EST) on Mar 7, 2010