Allow Publisher Series to be assigned to Publisher

Basically, allow users to assign Publisher Series to the correct publishing house, and then we will be able to create a record of which series were published by the publishing house.

There are also plenty of "true series" that could also be assigned to a publisher (mainly academic series, but there are plenty of others). I think it would be a good start to create a layer of bibliographic data that would be highly useful.

I'm not sure what you mean. Where would you assign it? IIRC, the only place with publisher info is the publication field in your catalogue (and it already has it, nothing to assign).

>2 SandraArdnas:

Where would you assign it?

I probably could have expressed myself better. LT would have to create a new "publisher" category. Thankfully, I think the architecture already exists: I could right now create a "Faber & Faber" publisher series page, and then identify all Faber publisher series as subseries of it. So, I think all that would have to be done is create another version of the series-type pages for publishers, and then change the relationship language and layout of the new "publisher" page.

I'd think this would be particularly valuable for academic publishers and defunct (or swallowed-up) publishers. I don't know to what extent bibilographic data exists on publisher series elsewhere.

Okay, so unless this is talking about connecting publisher's series directly to a publisher USER profile, this is the same as the other suggestion already posted and being discussed.

>4 gilroy:

It is not. The suggestions I made on the other thread would have done nothing to link different series from the same publisher. They are both suggestions to improve publisher series, of course, but they are not the same suggestion.

Well, once you create a publisher field, make it searchable, publisher series linked by way of the publisher field all...

Yes, all the same suggestion

I like this suggestion, for whatever low value my opinion holds around here.

I think this would be cool and would be a good first step toward later improvements to publisher series

Similar suggestion here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/324137

>7 aspirit:
>8 norabelle414:
Thanks for the endorsements!

I'm worried about the problems caused by dealing with the lifecycle of publishers, who are generally business companies. They change names: OK, this should be easy enough to handle. They are bought by other publishers. They merge. They split. And various books produced by them will be affected by these evolutions.
I'd rather see Librarything create an edition layer (a significant effort, but one that makes sense when it comes to describing books ) rather than a data model for organizations.

>11 Felagund:

I do think there will be some definition issues for publishers on the margins, but we deal with similar kinds of problems quite a lot (what counts as the same work? is it a series or are there merely some characters in common?) Most publishers will be pretty straightforward - it's probably just the biggest ones where we'll have to set up some guidelines.

I'm sure an edition layer would be great, but I think tying publisher series to publishers is relatively low-hanging fruit, since LT ought to be able to use the existing series architecture to create a new "publisher" level.

Rebooting this topic because I think it's a fairly easy improvement - and I didn't do a good job of explaining how this would work when I started the thread.

Right now we have two series-type categories: "Series" and "Publisher Series". What I am proposing is adding a third level: "Publisher", which we would then be able to add individual Publisher Series to those Publisher pages.

This is so easy we could jury-rig it now. I could create a new Publisher Series called "Faber and Faber", then assign one work from each existing Publisher Series from F&F to "Faber and Faber", then define the relationship as "contains".

This would allow us to organise Publisher Series by Publisher, which I think would be quite interesting. Penguin, Faber & Faber, OUP, and niche publishers would present interesting information.

Penguin is now part of Random House..

>13 gabriel: So what you're asking for is to be allowed to create a "series" of all a known publisher's works?

Wouldn't just creating a publisher's field and being able to get the information onto a publisher page do this better? As suggested by this user?
https://www.librarything.com/topic/325876#unread

>15 gilroy:

So what you're asking for is to be allowed to create a "series" of all a known publisher's works?

Well, it would be more a list than a series, but it would use the existing series architecture, so yes.

Wouldn't just creating a publisher's field and being able to get the information onto a publisher page do this better?

So, I think using the publisher field to create a publisher series list would create a major problem of misattribution. Pride and Prejudice is a member of a whole slew of publisher series. If people fill in the publisher field of their P&P copy with "Doubleday" "Oxford University Press", "Longmans", etc, etc. - and then we attribute publisher series to the publisher... all of the publisher series would get attributed to each of the publishers, then you'd have to create a way to select the correct one.

I think the simpler solution is just to create a new "Publisher" level within the series architecture, and allow users to assign publisher series to it.

>16 gabriel: I had to rethink this a little because I realized I was thinking too one dimensional, since this is a database, we need to think 3 dimensional.

Consider, new publisher field. Now we can aggregate all things published under that name into a single page. There's your list, like the author page or the tag page.

Taking this out further, now you have an ISBN to associate with a publisher.
Publisher Series can now aggregate the Publisher instead of the author at the top of the page.
Since you have a publisher associated with ISBN, you also have cover associated to ISBN and as a indirect link, to the publisher.
Now you can get your publisher specific cover onto your publisher series, by way of the publisher field.

Right now there are Publisher pages in LT, but their existence is dependent on the voluntary participation of the publishers themselves. So even if the relationships to series could be created in the database, we would be missing, e.g. defunct publishers of some series.
https://www.librarything.com/publishers

>18 paradoxosalpha: I think the dependence on the publishers to supply information was that feature's failing. We would likely have more complete and accurate information if regular LT members could add to publisher pages.

>18 paradoxosalpha: I think that would be an entirely different page than what I'm thinking. Reason being because they was specific to publishers to advertise new books. The page I'm working is from aggregate data entered by users.

>20 gilroy: working from

Do you mean hypothesizing? No such pages exist AFAIK.

Yes, suggesting not working.