How to add serials

How are you guys indexing periodicals/serials/journals?

We have loads to add eg History Workshop: a journal of socialist historians issue 6 but also thousands of magazines.

Library Thing has a habit of deciding that all issues of a periodical are the same work, and it doesn't allow enough characters in the date field.

I'm not even going to consider the issue of authors of individual articles..

For now I am just cataloging most of my periodicals by cataloging rules that say to make a record for the series title only. I used an open date for periodicals still in existence, like 2006- and for periodicals that are no longer publishing, I used closed dates, like 1985-1988. I started to add as many contributors as I could find under "contributor" in the other authors section.

However, as a (virtual) archive, I am more interested in adding each item individually for more precise information. So far I haven't found a good way to do this on LT.

I use the comments field as a notes field, to clarify the role of important contributors and what the publication dates refer to, if needed.