Sunset Books

Lane Publications/Sunset will (or used to, my interest falls off after the mid-1970s) update their home improvement, cooking, crafting, etc. books with a new edition every decade or so. These are complete ground-up reworks with major content changes, new copyright dates/LCCNs, and new cover designs, and as such each publisher's edition should have its own LT Work. The problem is that the titles often stay the same, and existing LT Edition data often isn't detailed enough to properly distinguish the publisher's editions; it gets easier once they start using ISBNs but that didn't kick in until 1968/1969. Is there a best practice for this? Maybe I just leave my own copies as their own works with a disambiguation notice that asks people to only merge with other LT editions that they can confirm are the same publisher edition? Are there any other similar collections of books where this problem has been solved?

So you're saying yours are already separate but you can't separate out the others? My suggestion would be to put a disambiguation notice on the combined works and on yours so others who have different versions can note theirs and move them accordingly.

I would suggest adding the date to your titles so that it is clear which edition your copy is.

Expanding on what gilroy and MarthaJeanne have said, there are some similar situations I have seen on LT. Since there are major revisions between editions, they SHOULD be separated out into the individual versions, though without identifying information on many of the entries that won't be completely possible in this case. So I'm not sure there is a really satisfactory "solution" or even an agree-on best practice. But there is benefit to doing the separation where it can be done. Some of the other situations I've seen have ended up with something like:

"Sunset's Favorite BBQ Squid Recipes, 1st Edition"
"Sunset's Favorite BBQ Squid Recipes, 2nd Edition"
"Sunset's Favorite BBQ Squid Recipes, 3rd Edition"
"Sunset's Favorite BBQ Squid Recipes (Unknown Edition)" -- where the unidentifiable entries live.

...or if the editions aren't numbered in that way:

"Sunset's Favorite BBQ Squid Recipes (1956 Edition)"
"Sunset's Favorite BBQ Squid Recipes (1959 Edition)"
"Sunset's Favorite BBQ Squid Recipes (1964 Edition)"
"Sunset's Favorite BBQ Squid Recipes (Unknown Edition)"

And then add a shared disambiguation notice to them all (especially the catch-all "Unknown" one) describing what you say above, Lazlo: "there are multiple substantially different versions of this work, please separate yours out and merge it into the appropriate entry..."

It could probably be justified to create a series page for such a situation: a regularly issued series of works on a certain topic with entirely or substantially new content in each.

>4 scott_beeler: My name is MarthaJeanne.

>5 MarthaJeanne: Apologies for inappropriately shortening you.

>6 scott_beeler: So fix it.

>4 scott_beeler: This is basically how I ended up handling the work naming, FWIW.

Creating a series for each title, containing all of that title's editions, makes sense, but if taken to the logical end that means a LOT of new series(es). Sunset already has multiple topic-based series (assigned by the publisher for earlier titles) and each of those top-level series has dozens of titles that went into multiple editions. I'll see how that goes as I work through splitting each title but it's likely to spark a larger discussion about series management at some point. One of my pet peeves about LT's data model is the conflation of "editions" and "printings" and this is where it causes the most difficulty in cataloging things. Though I guess the consequences of the database design weren't as obvious until the database got this large (see also: Discogs).