New Series 1.0 Main Topic, Part III

See the intro from @timspalding here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/321038#7178978

Is there a good reason why the series editor currently seems to be always created, whether 'Allow series author to be calculated' is switched on or not?

Sorry, are you saying that every series has a series author, whether or not that is set? Can you give me an example?

>3 timspalding:

Not sure if it's quite what shikari means, but The Cambridge History of War is a publisher series with a series author despite the checkbox not being set.

>4 AndreasJ: and >3 timspalding:
Yes, AndreasJ, precisely. So for example I set up a book series yesterday for the series Bible in Dialogue and made sure that 'Allow series editor to be calculated' was switched off, but a series editor was still allocated.

https://www.librarything.com/nseries/318891/Bible-in-Dialogue

>5 shikari:

Got it. Thanks. It's fixed.

Cheers, Tim!

Small thing, but it's very visually annoying: the divider between the name & the label for books in a series is showing up right in the middle of the screen, rather than close to the right - so you have: name... gap... divider... huge gap... label.

I hope that makes sense.

I'm using Chrome on Mac OSX 10.14

>8 gabriel: I am using Firefox on a Mac mini with macOS Catalina 10.15.7:

I was trying to understand your issue, so took a screenshot of a series you seem familiar with to use as an example:



Can you elaborate, or post a link?

>9 Conkie:

Yes, so the divider I'm talking about is the vertical line in your screenshot about 2/3rds of the way across the page from the right.

It's there to give a space for the label - usually 1, 2, 3..., but the Musical Pilgrim example doesn't have labels for the volumes.

I still think the fact that when you combine two works, you lose all series data if the work with "more"* members has none on it is an inconceivably bad choice. Data, just lost in the void.

* But "more" can be the same number!

>11 Stevil2001: Thanks for raising this concern; I'm gonna need to watch for it. I thought "only the first" survives just applied if more than one series is shown, not if one or the other has none. It clearly doesn't matter if two+ works have the same series CK, which is helpful when assembling a new series from a bunch of individual records (e.g., for a periodical).

Hi,

I have several books in the series https://www.librarything.com/nseries/1391/A-Very-Short-Introduction

But the series does not show up in either

Your Books: Series https://www.librarything.com/memberseries/MEMBERNAME
Stats/Memes: Series in your Library https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/series

>14 Nick_Terrible: it is a publisher series, not a regular one as some of the titles are published outside of it as well. Those series don’t show up in the stats. I wish they would add starts that show publisher series as well but oh well.

>15 AnnieMod: Since with no editon layer there is no way for system to recognize whether you copy is from a particular publisher series, the stat would be meaningless. VSI used to be a series in old CK system and IMO is more suited to it, but in a typical publisher series a single work appears in numerous publisher series and all of those wold appear in your stats, including the foreign language ones

>16 SandraArdnas: I know how series work - and what pushing pub series on a report/stats will do. Maybe it will be useless for how you use LT. For me it will be useful - now I need to build something via tags to emulate when LT has the data. Yes - there will be a ton of series I do not care about but the ones I do care about will be there. I’d rather have the data than not have the data. :)

>17 AnnieMod: I'm just saying the data does not tell you whether you have it or not. As long as you have any edition of a work in a publisher series, it counts as if it is in all of the publisher series associated with that work. There's no way to tell from the stats e.g. whether your edition of Mill on the Floss is Penguin Classic or not, or how many of Penguin Classics you have if any altogether

>18 SandraArdnas: Again - I know how pub series work. Where did I say anything about using it for figuring out which book of mine is in a Penguin edition? But I also know how to interpret my own data and I will find the lists useful. Just because it will be useless for you does not make it useless for everyone. And while Penguin and classic works of literature will be a pain indeed, other series are a LOT more manageable and the data is something I can use. Even with Penguin - it will tell me which of the books I have actually have a Penguin edition (even if mine may not be) and that’s not something I can do now unless I go series by series. As i said - it is better to have data than not to.

>18 SandraArdnas: I also regret the inability to be able to view a list of publisher series -- even though I'm aware that a complete list of all publisher series connected with works in my library would probably have a lot of irrelevant information.

Some people collect certain publisher series, and I agree that the inability to distinguish editions is problematic for this purpose. But this is not the only way people use publisher series.

For example, a lot of academic titles are included in publisher series dedicated to certain topics. The information that (an edition) of the work appeared in that publisher series is likely to be relevant for some users, regardless of whether the copy they own happens to be in that publisher series.

Likewise, in the realm of fiction, while many "publisher series" are essentially publisher imprints, there are still plenty with a far more specific focus (say, literature of the fantastic, or Chinese literature in translation), and this is again interesting information regardless of what edition I own because it situates my books in meaningful networks with other thematically related works.

Or to turn it around, publisher series can be a valuable way to identify books I don't own but might be interested in. The ability to use publisher series for this purpose is limited by the fact that there's no way to browse publisher series in my library.

I don't know if there is a good solution to this. Even users who care about publisher series probably aren't likely to actually want to see ALL publisher series connected with their library, but only selected ones.

I wonder whether some function to either "favorite" certain series or to "ignore" series one is not interested in would be a feasible option. I could see this being useful for regular series, too, not just publisher series. (I care more about some series I own than about others, and choosing which series one wants to see might provide a compromise for things like the proliferation of "Asterix" series due to the different numbering in different languages.)

>19 AnnieMod: I am not pointing that out just for you, but for anyone reading here. Nor am I arguing against such a feature. It's just information.

Feature request -- I wish I could add an entire series to my account at once. I don't care about particular ISBN, just want an electronic record of my wishlist. For example I'd like to add the Core books from series Harry Potter, Redwall: Publication Order, Mars Diaries, and Boxcar Children. It seems I have to manually gather hundreds of ISBNs just to add these four series.

You don't need to gather the ISBNs. You can put title and author into the search box

Is there a way to add a work to a Publisher series from the work page itself - or can it only be done from the series page?

Under series and work relationships (right above CK).
Click Add/edit and then search for the series you want to add the work to.

Is it possible to create a relationship to a series?

And is it possible to create a relationship between one work in a collection and a series? eg (for argument's sake) 'First Blood' and 'Imprint' which are part of Star Wars Legends and are issued in one book.

And what if the work is not mentioned separately? eg 'Jade Solitaire', which is part of Star Wars Legends is contained in Tales from the New Republic.

As far as I'm aware, you can't create a relationship to a series, only make a work part of a series. Either a work is part of a series or not. And if there is a relationship between one work and another work (a sequel, a rewriting of, etc.), with the second work being part of a series then there is automatically a connection to the series. If the relationship is "is contained in" then that work should be added to the series.

I'm not sure what you mean by "mentioned separately", but I take it to mean that it's not been published separately - only as part of a collection. You aren't allowed to create an LT listing for such works.

>27 PawsforThought:
If I remember correctly, the rule is that you aren't allowed to create a work **just for table of contents or relationship purposes** ; I must say that I still do not understand the reason for this rather specific taboo, so if anybody would like to explain I'm interested!

>27 PawsforThought: So, just to clarify, if a work is collected in an anthology and belongs to a series but the other works in the anthology are not connected to the series then I can put it under 'is contained in'. But not (at the moment) link it to a series; only to another work.

By 'mentioned separately' I meant that searching LT for 'Jade Solitaire' shows no results but I see from googling that it is contained in Tales from the New Republic. 'Tales' contains stories which are both canon and non-canon so I don't think I should add it wholesale to the Star Wars Legends series which is specifically non-canon.

ETA: on a related note, is it possible to list the works contained in Tales from the New Republic in somewhere like Common Knowledge for future reference, even though the works are not currently listed on LT?

>29 humouress: You can put the work as "is contained in" the anthology. But since it is not a separate publication and the rest of the works in the anthology are not connected to the series I would not recommend that you connect it to the series at all. As far as I know, it is not possible to add a relationship to a series, only to add a work to a series.

I don't see an appropriate place in CK to add the information about works contained which are not listed on LT. Other people might have ideas.

>29 humouress: I and a number of other people used occasionally 'book description' to enter contents. I use it mainly for essay collections, since a list of essays included is often better than any description and they are practically never entered as separate works, unlike short stories. As anything in CK, beware that anyone can delete that data.

Also, as far as I'm aware, many long-time members have decided to ignore the 'do not enter for relationship purposes' rule, after waiting for years for another solution that was supposed to be forthcoming. Since people legitimately enter perfumes, hardware, clothes and such, it never made much sense why entering short stories is the only area with restrictions.

>29 humouress: >30 PawsforThought: >31 SandraArdnas:
Alongside the CK Book Description, also can be worth a Disambiguation Note, if you discover if there are different but similar anthology works, eg. one containing 8 stories, another with 12, or one that has story X another that doesn't. This can be really helpful to fill in.

>28 Felagund: >31 SandraArdnas:
On the "don't add works just for relationships", the intent I believe was to prevent a helper, upon randomly meeting an anthology, adding new works solely so that they can link some relationships as part of the CK/helping. The site isn't primarily a bibliographic reference (consider, when a work has no copies remaining it entirely drops off the author's page). The site appears to primarily want to reflect what we users (in theory!) choose and curate into our libraries. If we start having to add works just in order to make relationships when we haven't got any desire otherwise to catalogue the work, things have gone a bit wrong. The no short stories always seemed a red herring, since even the slightest reason to want to catalogue (Wishlist, To Read, tags, reviews, etc. etc.) and we've got that as the reason, doing relationships is then a byproduct. If one genuinely has no other reason that's the point they want us to stop (and get help from Work Relationships Anonymous :-P).

>32 Nevov: If one genuinely has no other reason that's the point they want us to stop

Well glossed!

>32 Nevov: I get what you're saying, but it still makes no sense to me why would entering short stories for any reason at all be limited. On a book cataloguing site, that is infinitely more meaningful than someone's dress with a pic as a cover image. Why not solely for relationship? Is it not still a more meaningful work site-wide than the said dress? (I personally haven't entered any short stories that aren't standalones, but that's down to the way I want my catalogue to work. I do appreciate when anthologies have complete work-to-work relationships and live for the day when we will be able to rate and review individual items we have within larger works, without actually entering them. There's an RSI to that effect, we live in hope, lol)

>29 humouress: if a work is collected in an anthology and belongs to a series but the other works in the anthology are not connected to the series then I can put it under 'is contained in'. But not (at the moment) link it to a series; only to another work

The short story in the anthology has to exist as a work in order to create a work-to-work relationship showing it is contained in the anthology. If the work exists, it can be added to a series. (The anthology shouldn't be added to the series, but the short story which does belong to the series can be.)

The short story - if it exists as a work - can be contained in the anthology, and have a place in the series. If it doesn't exist as a work in LibraryThing, then neither can be done.

>32 Nevov: >34 SandraArdnas: I think that at the time, Tim was worried about people adding the stories, creating the relationships and then deleting them from their catalog(s) just so the relationships can be used as a de-facto table of contents (which we are still missing a place for). That would leave the 0 copy work both in the relationship and in the series... but it won't be on an author page - which will be very confusing for new users.

Thus the specific wording - if you are adding it so you have it in your catalog and/or adding a review and/or adding notes and so on, you are a lot less likely to delete it so... it is permitted. :)

>31 SandraArdnas: "I and a number of other people used occasionally 'book description' to enter contents."

Guilty, as charged.

>36 AnnieMod: I hadn't thought about the 0 copy works issue, but I have long suspected that he didn't want a rush of stories being entered that could have overwhelmed the site. Without that rule, I think a lot of us would have entered the stories for at least one or two anthologies.

>38 MarthaJeanne: And you may be right. Most likely it was a combination of the two plus a few other things we had not thought of.

>36 AnnieMod:
Thanks, that explanation makes some sense to me.

>30 PawsforThought: >31 SandraArdnas: >32 Nevov: >35 r.orrison: (et al) Thank you. In short, there's no real way to connect a story in an anthology to a series if that story doesn't exist as a separate work on LT. (I don't really want to add works that I don't own or have read, anyway, so I don't plan to create works just to add them.)

(But I could make a note in CK of 'book description' with a list of works, with a Disambiguation Notice if relevant.)

>36 AnnieMod: That makes sense as a potential issue.

>31 SandraArdnas: Since people legitimately enter perfumes, hardware, clothes and such, it never made much sense why entering short stories is the only area with restrictions.

Clearly the answer is to eject all the non-books and embrace being a book chauvinist site.

Question: if you search for a series (say Vorkosigan in the results you get some deleted series (though you can still click on them). But there are also some series (Miles Vorkosigan, for example) which have been combined into other series but are not marked as such on the search results page, so you don't find out until you go to that series' page. Shouldn't they also be marked as 'deleted' or 'archived' on the search results page?

Request: can the touchstones for series (and series names in search results) also include the author name where relevant, much the same as for work touchstones? If there are multiple series with the same name (Nine Worlds for example) quite a few very different series come up and you have to go into them to find out which the one you want is. I do add the author's name in curly brackets to a series name if I get a confusing search result - but inevitably someone else will come along at some point and remove it again (as has been done, in the example below, to the Victoria Goddard series).

'Nine Worlds' series per search results and touchstones:

The Nine Worlds Rising

The Nine Worlds - Internal Chronological Order

The Nine Worlds {Denning, Richard}

Worlds of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

The Nine Worlds - Author's Recommended Reading Order

The Nine World Chronicles {Wolf, Lyra}

Worlds of Deep Space Nine (Deleted)

>43 gabriel: The demonstrate my open mind, I'm about to catalogue my cats, with their pics as cover image.

>44 humouress: There's an RSI already filed to deal with the deleted and archived series. And it's been mentioned to developers as a good idea.
https://www.librarything.com/topic/340825

>45 humouress: When the new module was created, Tim declared we "don't need to note names on series anymore" even though functionality has proven that statement false.
And I will add last name only, unless there are more than one of that last name, then first initial.

But there are people who remove the names anyway, because it: 1) screws up their personal series list, or b) because Tim said we don't need it any more. *face palm*

I'm having difficulty clicking on touchstones/ names to get to works from a series page. Sometimes the pop-up comes up and obscures it but even if it doesn't, it looks like the only way I can get to the work page is to wait for the pop-up and then click on the touchstone/ link in the pop-up box.

Safari Version 18.3.1 (20620.2.4.11.6)
MacBook Pro macOS Sequoia 15.3.2 (24D81)

ETA: ignore this; it seems to have been a temporary glitch. But I will leave it here for future reference because I remember it happening before.

>49 humouress: Maybe some part of the page did not load fully (that can make all kinds of links and buttons and actions not working)?

Since the new Works pages have come on line, it looks as though the system has been mucking around with the Series pages. I've noticed a lot of relationships have been removed though some of them seem to have been added back. I'm hoping the system will go back and replace them rather than members having to do so manually. (For example, Ardneh's World.)

>51 humouress: This wasn't the work page update that did it. There was a system/server glitch months before the new work pages that kept backing out proper combinations and such. Even had a bug on it.

>52 gilroy: Oh, okay. But the glitch still isn't resolved? Because (if you look at the edit history) the edits I've been coming across have been done this year (January 2025 onwards).

I'll see if I can find the bug report.
ETA: Nope. I've gone crossed-eyed trawling back through 5 pages to August and didn't find it.

>53 humouress: Correct. Not resolved. The bug is from 2024 I want to say.
EDIT: Nope. Farther back than I thought. 2022: https://www.librarything.com/topic/340818

As you can see from your example series, from February 10 to March 19 - those edits are system glitches. Otherwise they'd have an attribution to the person making the change.

>54 gilroy: Thanks. I've added a post to the bug report.

Hello anyone who can answer the question!

I am trying to add a number of books to a Series, but having some difficulty making the titles consistent - both in the ones that I am adding and thus also some already there.

It would appear that the title used is not derived from what I have entered in my own books, but from somewhere else, and is inconsistent in that some include/exclude the series name (not a great solution) and/or the series 'number' (seems fairly sensible) within the title.

Is there a mechanism for actually editing the titles in the list, or are these fixed elsewhere.

Thanks
Gavin in Ludlow - yes the UK

I should perhaps have added that the series I am dealing with with is https://www.librarything.com/nseries/94483/Oakwood-Library-of-Railway-History

>56 RavenLane: Many people prefer to NOT have the series name in the title, so it almost always is altered at the work level. You can have it on your own books, but know that site wide, it won't be kept. Same with the series numbering, unless it is specifically part of a title. (Like Chainsaw Manual 1 and Chainsaw Manual 2).

The title itself will be the most commonly entered among all the books in the work according to the system. So if something is improperly combined, it might show up wrong. If you could give a couple books as examples, maybe we can help find the problem, since we can't see your private library.

I loathe having the series name in the title, which is characteristic of Amazon data. Having the titles that way on the series page is especially awful, since it is purely superfluous there.

Hello Gilroy and paradoxosalpha

I can see I managed to confuse with my message... sorry about that

"some include/exclude the series name (not a great solution)" - was not well formatted! What I meant to say was INCLUDE - NOT A GREAT SOLUTION. It is often the case that when one reads something a while later one realises it did not come across as intended.

So - like you both - I would like to EXCLUDE the Series Name from within the title - very much seems unnecessary duplication.

As a single example, to keep it simple, in the aforementioned list there is

'The Wrexham, Mold and Connah's Quay Railway: Including the Buckley Railway (Oakwood Library of Railway History)'

This is referenced as OL83 by the publisher, and I think is sensibly given the ID 83 in the list.

In my own library I have this book identified as

'The Wrexham, Mold and Connah's Quay Railway including the Buckley Railway (OL83)'

This seems more sensible, since it avoids duplication of the series name, whilst at the same time giving space for the reference number.

So when I look at the series list the name shows as a few lines above - with the (Oakwood Library of Railway History) in the title. When I click on that title it goes to what I perceive as my copy of the book, which has the title as shown in the second example.

What I was trying to understand is to how to alter the titles in the Series itself so that they are consistent, probably removing the '(Oakwood Library of Railway History)' where it occurs, and replacing it with the equivalent of '(OL83)'. But I cannot see where to edit this bit of information.

Is this perhaps something to do with my library being private - never really thought about that in the past, and cannot see an issue to changing it to public if that resolves the problem.

Sorry to confuse you initially.
Gavin

PS. Just going to walk the dogs in the forest - back in a couple of hours!

I don't think the public/private setting impacts the calculation of the most common title for the work.

One thing you can do is to kick off a title recalculation, because sometimes an inferior/irregular title (like one that includes the series title) will be held over even after there has been enough entry to vote it down, as it were. In the right-hand sidebar (or way, way down at the bottom on mobile) of a work page, you can see "Recalculate title/author." Click that.

The name of the book is clearly The Wrexham, Mold and Connah's Quay Railway : including the Buckley Railway, without any series number or series information. Why can't we simply set the canonical title to that? Isn't this what canonical title is for?

>61 anglemark:

I believe so.

OK I can see your points and they make sense to me. The true title is without any series name or number. Is there anywhere within the record of a book to sensibly store the 'OL83' (this is as printed on the book) or is the only home for this within the Series information.
Learning a lot here thanks!
Gavin

>61 anglemark: As I understand, it's an LT convention that canonical titles should be seldom needed, but I find them useful in instances like those you describe, where a series name, number, or other extraneous information would show up as part of a calculated title. Like >57 gilroy: & >58 paradoxosalpha:, I almost always edit my own work titles to avoid such details - a title should in fact be the title! That said, I often appreciate when other members' work entries show include some of these details, as they can helpfully tell something more about a single work, its series, and anthologies or collections of related works.

>63 RavenLane: I often put stuff like OL83 in the Comment field, so I know that I can search for it within my own records. I also put in stuff like:
Bo Bojesen tegninger, bind 1983
to indicate a series that I might want to get some more of. I started doing that after looking at library records for some of the publisher series I collected. Most of the time a title or two would be missing either because of a typo or simply because it hadn't been registered and once in a while because the publisher decided to change the name halfway through a series :-)

>64 jasbro: They shouldn't be used to enforce one preferred variant over another, like a US title over a UK title, or a title in sentence casing over one in heading casing, or to add or remove a subtitle. But I do believe it's quite encouraged to use them to remove extraneous information that's not part of the actual title.

1) I'd like to suggest, for long series with many sub-series, that we have touchstones on the series page to make it easier to navigate around. (Just a small pony.)

Rivers of London to take a random example.

2) I noticed over the past couple of days that when adding a work to a series I used to be able to scroll the faded-out series list behind the pop-up box (so I could check that my labelling was correct) but today I haven't been able to do that. Would it be possible to get that function back please?

>67 humouress: Uh, for point 1, you set the relationship under the Relationship/Combine box, then you have a list of the sub series at the top of the right-hand column.
You can even note series that have nothing to do with the series. Not sure why you'd need a different set of touchstones?

>68 gilroy: Sorry, I phrased it badly. I should have said for a series page with many sub-categories (eg graphic novels, selections, omnibus editions or whatever) on the same page. I didn't mean linked/ related series. It would make it easier than having to scroll.