All right, so about 1/3 to 1/2 of my book collection is composed of manga (Japanese comic books). Naturally, a lot of my time combining & contributing common knowledge deals with manga. In the past few months, I've noticed either one user, or a few users, have been submitting canonical titles that I have a really big problem with. If you're not familiar with manga, just know that almost all manga books are part of a series. I'm sure in the past we've all had trouble figuring out what is the best part to indicate that something is book 2 or volume 2 in a series, but obviously when you don't quite know, you need to either look at the book OR go to the official publisher's site. With manga, it doesn't list the correct way on the book itself. But if you go to the official sites for English-translated manga, you can clearly see that the correct way to tag books in series is with "Vol. 1" or "Vol. 2" & so on. If you're a little confused, let me give you an example. Take the series, Revolutionary Girl Utena (http://www.librarything.com/author/saito...). Now, on the official Viz site, it clearly has the volumes listed like I put before (http://viz.com/products/products.php?ser...) however, when you go to the work pages here on Librarything, someone has put "(1)" "(2)" etc. for each volume. To give an example of another publisher, let's take the series Peach Girl (http://www.librarything.com/author/uedam...) on the Tokyopop official site (http://www.tokyopop.com/product/1319) it says to label them "Vol. 1" "Vol. 2" etc.

Anyway, I just wanted to make this topic & ask if everyone agrees that this is the best way to title manga? Obviously you can label them anyway you want in your personal library, but when you're submitting common knowledge, it's best to do it how the publisher says, if the book doesn't list the correct way.

I have linked to just a few author pages where someone has changed the titles incorrectly. To be fair, a few months ago I noticed a LOT more series that had been labeled this way, but apparently some other Helpers have been correcting this. Also, sorry if this was a little confusing......if you also deal with manga on LT you'll know what I'm talking about, but if you haven't yet, you might be confused. Thanks for listening anyway : )

http://www.librarything.com/author/saito...
http://www.librarything.com/author/makiy...
http://www.librarything.com/author/narus...
http://www.librarything.com/author/uedam...

To be honest, I think it makes more sense to use Vol. # in order to differentiate between that and chapters. I don't know if anyone is cataloguing individual manga chapters, but I could see it happening if they are working from a magazine, the way some folks catalogue the individual short stories from a science fiction magazine, or something. (I would hope that the catalogued chapters would be titled with Ch. # at the very least, too, of course.)

Another thing that just occurred to me - series info is usually listed "Series Name (#)" and shows up right next to the canonical title, right? I could see that someone would just copy from one to the other or use the same form for both if they were simply trying to get rid of redundancies in the title that floated to the top.

However, I'm not sure it's a huge deal to change all the instances of (#) to (Vol. #). It's kind of like (at least to me) the way Adventures of Huckleberry Finn technically doesn't have a "the" at the beginning of title, but a huge portion of popular editions include it, so either version would be correct as canonical, using the "how would people know this best?" method.

(I personally don't include "the" in the title, and I make sure to indicate "volume" somewhere in the title of my manga, though I haven't been consistent with the format yet — I think I'm going to go tidy them up right now, in fact.)

That's true, there are a few manga from the late 90s that came out in serialized comic form & a few people have those catalogued.

And while I agree that someone may have just c&p'd from series name, and wish I could give someone the benefit of the doubt, I know for a fact that a certain user prefers to tag their own manga in that way and then started changing the canonical names to match what they had in their own library.

For sure, it's not a huge deal to change it back......it just gets sort of annoying when you're in an edit war with someone, haha. ; )

(personally, I have all my manga meticulously tagged - I had way too much time on my hands at one point - and they are all "Vol. #" but when adding canonical titles it doesn't really bother me if someone does "Volume" instead)

I have no manga, but it looks to me as if the titles should be of the form 'Vol. 1' or equivalent, with the individual volume title included as well. The user (Usa-p) that made the change to the '(1)' form looks quite well established, and it may well be just a genuine mistake. Unfortunately just removing canonical titles doesn't have the desired effect of just reverting to the most popular form, so it will take some effort if you are going to correct the CK.

Go ahead and change it to match the covers and titles as they were published - it looks like this person was working on the series and probably was just doing a simple copy & paste to get the canonical titles in there. They were being work efficient, that's all.

The main "problem" with manga titles is that you do get that portion that insists on entering original Japanese titles, so entering a CK title becomes a necessity.

If the person who entered the (1) has it that way in their catalog, you'll not alter their view. What you will do is clean it up for everyone on the site. Don't sweat it.

As a holder of both individual issue and full volume manga, I agree with using Vol. (or Volume) 1, etc. Doesn't LT have a bit of a problem properly sorting information that occurs in parentheses, or am I remembering something wrong?

I don't know if anyone is cataloguing individual manga chapters, but I could see it happening if they are working from a magazine, the way some folks catalogue the individual short stories from a science fiction magazine, or something.

I never thought of that. Hmmm. If LT ever develops a more robust system for cataloging anthologies and tagging, reviewing, etc. of individual stories, I may have to do that. I'll just stick to adding the information to comments for now.

Doesn't LT have a bit of a problem properly sorting information that occurs in parentheses, or am I remembering something wrong?

To some extent. You can't rely on stuff put in parentheses to end up correctly autocombined. So please do check the author pages if/when you enter books in your own catalogue that way. But I don't think it will bother canonical titles.