Disambiguation--esp. with periodicals and series

I started looking at author pages because I was wondering why so few people had any of my books. Then I started combining works. Then I started separating works. Then I started combining and separating authors. This is leading to great problems because people haven't a clue about assigning authorship. Take a look at the Singer Sewing Reference Library. The number of authors is astonishing, including our friend Isaac B.

Corporate authorship is mysterious, but since works on LT are connected by authorship, a person has got to type *something*. Do you know how many works were written by Unknown?

Periodicals are especially frustrating, especially when well-known magazine have spin-offs or licensees. Good Housekeeping is a good example. Right know I'm struggling with Vogue Knitting. In fact, Vogue Knitting is a special problem, because some misguided soul/s have assigned all sorts of things that have *nothing* to do with knitting to The Editors of Vogue Knitting Magazine. Such as Letters to Penthouse. Maybe someone needs a copy of Naughty Needles.

What's a (somewhat obsessive) girl to do?

IreneF

Okay, so what do you want exactly?

I started putting my periodicals into my library, then removed them and decided I'd wait until there was a good answer to this very question before trying again.

Of course, most of my mags are literary, so it's fairly easy to find the issue's editor and work from there, but the results in my library were ungainly. Maybe once collections are unveiled I'll have a separate collection for periodicals.

You don't *have* to list anything for authorship, and works are also connected (or connectible) by title, isbn, etc., not just author. Most RL library catalogs don't list author or editor information for periodicals, so that would be the (author-less) way I'd go. I also don't think most RL libraries catalog individual issues, but rather the journal as a whole, with a note for which issues are held in that library. That would be my model for magazines and periodicals, though I realize that might not work for everyone.

Book series, and books published by magazines (e.g. the Good Housekeeping Cookbook) are a different matter, and IMO should definitely be cataloged individually and should *not* be combined with the the magazine that published it (or with other books in the series, in the case of book series). But if there's no clear author for those either, I'd still just leave the author blank. That much you can do for your own catalog, but it won't be possible to clean up other people's. You can combine books with different authors, however, by combining from the "editions" page.

PS - That said, I have actually made exceptions for literary reviews, and I've cataloged a couple of issues of those as individual books.

Letters to Penthouse is actually credited to

Magazine, The Editors of Penthouse

Magazine, The Editors of Vogue Knitting

is identical to over 20 charcters, so LT reads them as the same.

For your own books, if you chose a corporate author, try to chose one that is dissimilar fairly early in the name. IE Vogue Knitting is better than 'Magazine, the Editors of... . That doesn't help though once the other has been combined in.

We've been recently discussing it here:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/50381#902652

Actually they should be dissimilar in the last word and the first few words. Somewhere in the processing (is it when you enter or import an author without a comma in the name?) LT takes the last word and assumes its a last name and plops it in front with a comma after it.

I have several authors in my catalog that show up without the comma. Part of my catalog reads:

Arbuthnot, Andy
Archaeology Magazine
ARCYB Editor
Ariarajah, S. Wesley

Magazine, The Editors of Penthouse showed up like that in the catalog.

Re: MarthaJeanne & jjwilson61

Yes, I suspected there was a limit to the number of characters LT was reading.

And the comma is optional. It depends on how you enter or download the author information. If there's no comma LT doesn't do anything.

Although I understand that LT doesn't really want to cater to those that enter non-book type works I, personally, think that periodicals would be a worthy exception in that they still fit the bill as a "Bound Printed Material."

One of the problems with periodicals is the inconsistancy of "Author" another is the lack (usually) of ISBN, so combining is very difficult. But even search by Periodical Name and year/date to find items to combine can get tricky.

As I have mentioned in my posts requesting Anthology/short story friendly features - I think it would be great if you could select a "type" of work and get relevant fields to enter info into so that, by default, you could have some sort of organization to the data across LT users.

So for "Book" you would get the current fields, and for "Periodical" you would get:
Periodical/Magazine Name
Editor
Volume Number
Issue Number
Frequency
- Monthly (get drop down for months)

- Weekly (get entry field for dates)
- Qtrly (get drop down Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring and Jan-Mar, Apr-June, July-Sep, Oct-Dec)
- Other (create your own)

As with books the only one you would HAVE to enter was Title.

THEN you could have a Periodical Page - similar to a series page - and people could document in the Periodical info box things like changes in title and editor etc. AND on THAT page you could have it show who has the periodical etc (like one the tag page).

I'm of the opinion that any serious library catalog should support periodicals. I wouldn't list them by issue but by "volume" (usually that equals a specific year). And I would applaud it if LT supported ISSN.

Re: PortiaLong and Barking Matt

Libraries usually catalog periodicals w/out authorship credit, and the entry just says "Time" or "Scientific American" or whatever, and then the library's holdings. I've entered a couple of magazines like that, where I a fairly continuous run. I also have some individual issues that are particularly interesting, which I have cataloged individually, or where I have only a few random issues.

Another difficulty are series such as Time-Life's "Great Ages of Man". I have several of these. The individual volumes are called things like "The Age of Exploration" or "Ancient _______", and I think each volume has an author. People have been entering these all which way.

All of this is meaningless for people who aren't interested in what other people have in their libraries. But it's of interest to me for personal reasons, and I think it could be useful for people who are hobbyists, collectors, or even historians, who would like access to certain materials that aren't usually held by libraries. I would be willing to scan or photocopy small numbers of pages for other people. And I think it would be totally cool if people could get copies of the missing pages from their books.

And I totally agree that LT should support ISSNs.

I'm itching to start adding my periodicals so anything going in that direction is a plus to me :)

When it comes to searching by ISSN, the problem is not with LT, but with the sources. Some of them you can search other numbers on. I often search the British Library on LoC number - and it works often enough. I just searched another older book on the 9 digit code that was on it. It showed up.

If the sources have cataloged on the number, you can search on it right now. If they haven't, LT can't make it work.

Yes, but LT doesn't have an ISSN catalog field.

I think an ISSN field would be a site improvement.

I'd like to see some kind of periodicals/serials/series field for the purposes of disambiguation. I have several books and periodicals that fall into this amorphous category.

E.g. The Time-Life "Great Ages of Man" series, each volume of which seems to have a unique author.

I also have books from the Singer Sewing Reference Library, which is a series produced by a publisher that either changed its name or was acquired more than once. In fact, different publishers show up on different print runs of the same book. (The publishers use the Singer name under license.) Since there is no author per se, people often use the publisher.

And so on....

ISSN's are only of limited value, as they only refer to the periodical's title, and not to issue or volume number. I believe they are controlled somewhat tightly by some group in Paris, and probably LT doesn't want to pay a license fee. ISSN's are 8 digits (xxxx-xxxx), but there are extensions for media type, I believe.

That said, I would like a good system for serials like periodicals. Serials with ISBN's like almanacs can be easily grouped into an LT series, but this does't really work too well for magazines. If a periodical has theme issues, and it has spine with text (e.g. periodical name), I will enter it into LT, particularly Parabola.

vpfluke:

I didn't know there were licensing considerations.

I realize ISSNs refer only to the periodical's title, but that can still clear up a lot of problems, because people use differing names as titles (Woman's Day, Woman's Day Knitting (or cooking or whatever; Vogue, Vogue Magazine, Vogue Knitting, Vogue Knitting International, Nihon Vogue; Threads, Taunton's Threads, Threads Magazine.....)

I've been entering single issues as if they were books, but if I have more than about 1/2 a dozen, I use the comments field to list the issues I have.

It would be great to have a way to streamline that operation.

The extension to the ISSN is the Serial Item and Contribution Identifier. Wikipedia gives an explanation at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Item_and_Contribution_Identifier This would cover volume and article identification.

The Wiki ISSN article states that the ISSN'a numbers are not directly determinable without a subscription, despite its initial funding by UNESCO. I think the idea is is that LT would have to subscribe to the ISSN office. National libraries take care of ISSN in their own country and Paris coordinates them all.

If ISSN isn't open we can forget about it.

But LT picks up the ISSN information in the MARC record if the periodical is entered from a library source. See MARC record information on the bottom of the editions pages for:

http://www.librarything.com/work/319773/editions/

http://www.librarything.com/work/1000879/editions/3319581

http://www.librarything.com/work/3587891/editions/1876577

http://www.librarything.com/work/1920923/editions/8472030

http://www.librarything.com/work/1920952/editions/8437852

Or is this one of the reasons LT is no longer showing MARC information for more recenltly entered works?

You may not be able to pull ISSN numbers from the issuing body directly, but you can pull them from public-access academic catalogs. LT already uses bots that tie into Amazon, LOC, etc.---why can't it use a bot to troll academic search engines?

LT doesn't have bots. It uses interfaces provided by the sites to search their data.

OK, so that changes things, but only slightly. Why can't LT search those catalogs using "interfaces provided by the sites"? Is it technologically impossible without being granted some sort of access permission by the site operator? I am somewhat skeptical that LT hammered out a deal with the Library of Congress when it was still being run by one guy.

25>

LT doesn't want to have to develop protocols to use hundreds of different interfaces. Most libraries have a standard interface to allow external searching of their catalogs, and that's what LT uses. LT has a separate mechanism to search Amazon because it's the 800-pound gorilla of the book world and they can't really ignore it. But they aren't going to cook up separate code to interact with every other bookseller or library on the planet that doesn't conform to the standard.

That's not really the point, though. I'm sure some of those 600+ catalogs, including many university libraries, have ISSN numbers, but because LT is primarily designed for books it doesn't use them.

pjkrog2, you can search talk messages for "z39.50" for lots more discussion on that protocol.