Do no delete Series information when combining

This topic was discussed in a bug report after the new series system was introduced, see https://www.librarything.com/topic/335019. The conclusion was that this was not a bug, but intended by the system.
For me, this topic has become relevant again because I found a lot of combining work to be done on foreign works that have very few copies, like the Tex comics https://www.librarything.com/nseries/91956/Tex. This involves combining mostly 1 copy works, of which only 1 has the series information. This series information is lost more than half of the time, which costs a lot of extra work.
My suggestion is to reverse the current rule: keep all series information and if anything is wrong after, you can edit. In my experience with combining on LT, this would save tons of work. I hope this suggestion is considered by the team!

>1 SimoneA: As a combiner I strongly support this recommendation.

Yes please!

>1 SimoneA: How does the series information get lost? Is that a bug or something that the combiner does without understanding what they are doing?

>4 krazy4katz: It is how the new series system works - the series info from the smaller works during a combination is simply lost.

The only thing the combiner can do is to re-add the now combined work into the dropped series (or add the bigger work into them before they combine).

It is not a bug per se - LT had indicated that this was done on purpose.

PS: We usually loose a LOT of publisher series from non-English small works that make it into the big works. The screen tells you that you will lose them but you still need to manually readd if you want to and not all combiners follow up on that.

>1 SimoneA: YES!

>5 AnnieMod: If they realoze that there was series information and know what it was.

>7 MarthaJeanne: Yeah. If the combination goes through and they do not realize it, finding out what had been in the smaller works is... almost impossible.

Pretty please!!

It seems to me that if you have to choose between series data (or lack thereof) for each book being combined, then the "larger" (more copies) book doesn't necessarily have a higher likelihood of complete/correct series references. More isolated copies may have involved manual entry, in which case they may be more likely to have series info filled in, where more common books with numerous copies may have been added from sources, with little subsequent work from the users.

>5 AnnieMod: Huh. This never occurred to me. I don't think I have seen any warnings but I will have to check more carefully. Thank you.

Weighing in in favor. More harm than good being done, I expect.

I don't know why they decided to pass along only series information from one work in the combination, but I hope that this change is possible.

(I try to be careful and re-add info that was removed, but it would be so much easier if we didn't have to worry about it.)

>11 krazy4katz: It lists the series that both are assigned to and it adds a "Be sure to read all series notices. Only the series on the first work will be preserved, although it can be fixed afterwards." warning at the bottom...

Which is better than what we had at the start - but still is a pain and newish users won't know how to fix that (and if the Publisher series is in a language you do not speak, it may get complicated sometimes to actually fix it).

It is very visible - unless you are distracted but it is still a pain and does more harm than it actually helps IMO.

This was picked up when the new series was implemented back in 2020... There were a lot of complaints about losing that information. I seem to remember Tim agreeing to keep all information when this was pointed out, but I can't find that, and I don't think it ever happened.

As you say, it's bad with publisher series in a foreign (to you) language. A work-around would be to open the work page of the work with the missing info and add it before you combine it, but that would be tedious when a work is in a large number of series. I suspect you may have to refresh the combination confirmation page as well.

The suggestion made by >1 SimoneA: et al. seems reasonable to me, and I support it.

I also understand some of the concerns raised.

However, I can imagine technical solutions that would help with data cleanup:
Identifying entries (font style, color, etc.),
perhaps a separate section or sections that document the origin, etc.

The developers or experienced users surely know of other and better solutions.

This would be a big help with publisher series that are not just in a different language, but also it's a language that uses different characters. I can preserve an Italian publisher series just fine, even if I don't exactly understand all the words, but if it's Chinese, I can't even be totally sure if I'm copying and pasting correctly.

It would also be more consistent with how practically everything else works when you combine.

This drives me nuts. I work with a lot of low-copy media tie-in works; sometimes I'll add a Doctor Who audio drama, and combine my one-copy work with an existing one-copy work and an existing two-copy work. And of course the series info has already been entered on the other one-copy work, so I have to recreate it all!

>18 Stevil2001: But in that case, you actually care about getting it right. Often, I am on an author page for some other reason, but notice two works that should be combined. So I stop whatever else I was doing to combine them. Generally that is a matter of a few clicks, a few seconds, and I can get back to whatever I was working on. However if there is a series problem, I can forget about my real purpose and chase down the series, I can combine ignoring the series problem, or I can just not combine. Probably the last, almost certainly not the first.

See https://www.librarything.com/topic/335019#n9053190

I've added this.

>20 timspalding: Amazing, thanks!