Making Sure I'm on the Right Track

With the new Series feature, I'm finding that combined/uncombined works are becoming even more obvious (I had no idea...).

I just de-combined a few items because they were different editions. The first was an author that had done a book on Project Management with Microsoft Project 2000 and then had done a new edition with Microsoft Project 2003. To me, this was something that needed to be decombined as new editions of Microsoft Project have loads of features that old versions do not have.

However, how do you handle 2nd Edition, 3rd Edition and the like? I'm of the mind that these should also not be combined because they're really updated and different books, right? I guess I just want to make sure that I'm thinking along the right lines before I muck up someone else's hard work...

Oh, and after doing the Philip Marlowe series, I really don't even know where to start with Raymond Chandler:

http://www.librarything.com/combine.php?author=chandlerraymond

There's 17 ways to Sunday of mess in these books - a lot of omnibuses are wrongly combined...and then there's stuff that I'm 99% sure isn't an actual work...

2nd Edition, etc. - well, those are tough. For non-reference books, there is usually little, if any, difference. (A first edition Moby Dick will have the same content as one published today.) It's when you get into things like the Microsoft Project book you mention that there can be significant changes. I'd say, leave them separate unless you know that they are basically the same.

Most of the time people have combined updated editions unless they are aware that the changes to the text are extensive. There is sometimes disagreement about this but when you think of things like science textbooks, for which new editions are released nearly every year with only minor changes, and which are owned by only a tiny number of users, the social aspect of combining the editions outweighs the differences in what amounts to a few problem sets at the ends of chapters.

That said, I would say you were probably right to separate the books on MS Project, because they involve different programs rather than just updated editions with the same program (though a case could be made either way, since the second program is itself an update of the first).

my suggestion would be to put a disambiguation notice on the updated MS Project 2003 to indicate that there have been MAJOR changes/updates to the book. You might also note that the number of pages/chapters has been increased.

>2 lilithcat: Ah, that's what I thought.

And to clarify, I meant 2nd & 3rd editions on strictly non-fiction works. Generally, I'd wait to see something pretty significant on a work of fiction - say The Stand vs. The Stand: the complete & uncut edition as being two separate works.

Thanks for making me feel better about what I was doing!

EDIT: And much thanks to everyone else on the quick advice while I was typing.

As for Chandler I can't believe his work is any more complicated in its connections than Michael Moorcock. I don't think that the way Moorcock has been done is the best - there are far too many omnibuses listed, the individual books which make up the omnibus aren't in their proper little series. But at least it is a start.