TOC for literary collections

TOC, especially for literary collections, would be very useful.

What is "TOC"?

I'm guessing either Thoroughbred Owners of California or Table of Contents.

TOC = table of contents

Big fat 'Yes please' from me on the TOC or some kind of contained in relationship (I use 'Comments' at the moment but that's not entirely satisfactory)

Please? :)

I'll echo the "please".

In the meantime, I currently will occassionally enter this info in the "book description" (if there is nothing else there). Not searchable but at least others can see it.

PS. I have been clamoring for a "contents" or "miniworks/inclusions" feature for a while - but I have to admit when I see TOC I first think "Test of Cure"...

Yes!

This would be lovely!

TOC would be great, I have over 150 anthologys and I have no idea how many short story collections and I would love to see how many books I have with the same story or which book the story is in.

Ooo, table of contents...!

I tag the ToC.

>15 DromJohn:

I'm intrigued. Could you say more?

For one of the extreme taggings see:
The Norton anthology of American literature : volume 2

My detail URL

http://www.librarything.com/work/2101959/details/15072992

This excessiveness was worthwhile when my stepson was assigned a summer reading The Awakening by Kate Chopin, which he had to read in the thin onion skin pages of heavy The Norton Anthology instead of a light personal paperback.

>17 DromJohn:

I checked out your library when I read >15 DromJohn:. I'm curious how you use the tags. Do you find them something to turn to on a regular basis?

>18 Alixtii:
Often if not regular.
As a reference librarian, I find that searchable 505 fields (ToC) very useful. And as a law librarian a subscription database, IndexMaster, of law titles ToC and indexes is one of my most valuable tools.

I'm working through fiction, and will then do poetry. We are debating tagging the cookbooks.

Yes! Please !!

Contents cataloguing has been discussed before.

My take on it is that if it is going to be done it should be done properly.

A short story should be almost a first class item in the database. I would want to review it, combine it (maybe due to translations or title changes), tag it, add comments about it, and add CK to it. I could imagine that others would want to rate it (I don't bother rating things). I would want to be able to see all the books / magazines that a particular story appears in as well as show all the short stories in a particular book.

Of course to do all that is pretty time-consuming and would require quite a lot of careful thought about a useful UI.

21 <3

>21 andyl:

The thing is, part/whole functionality is something which is desperately needed anyway, since even without short stories being in the database as 1st class items (although they already are in many cases) there's still things like the relationship between LotR and RotK which turns things like recommendations into a mockery and screws up connections.

>22 infiniteletters:, 23

I actually think the heart in >22 infiniteletters: is prettier than the one in >23 Collectorator:.

#24

The problem is that partial solutions tend to become permanent temporary fixes.

The reason why there are so many short stories added as works is because of the lack of a full contents cataloguing system. It is a very poor work round. It doesn't solve all the issues very well at all - I cannot find out what books and magazines a short story appears in. It 'pollutes' the list of works on an author page - 'all short stories by this author' might be better shown as a separate collapsible section rather than intermixed with longer works.

I add my table of contents to the Comments of the work. It allows me to search and to see what books a short story appears in and all the works that contain a particular short story. As you can see from my list of wants this also doesn't address my requirements.

I have to agree with 24 -- Short stories should be cataloged as works, that's the right way to do it, for all the reasons cited. What we need then is a way to say this work is part of that work (the part/whole functionality Alixtii says is needed). It has to be a two-way thing, The Return of the King is part of The Lord of the Rings and The Lord of the Rings contains The Return of the King. That will have the effect of creating a Table of Contents for the containing work.

Doing just a Table of Contents as such is a partial solution, and makes things within the ToC second-class citizens.

(On the other hand, perhaps they could come up with something like the Relationships CK field, where if the thing entered exists as a work, then a link is created, but if it doesn't you can still enter plain text. Hmmm.)

One reason why this is taking so long is that it's not just a two-way thing.

It's a "many-many" thing. One anthology contains many short stories, each of which can be in other anthologies.

Yeah, I don't think it's anything we should expect any time soon.

For the longest time, though, this is what I thought was meant by "Collections." I still sort of wish it was.

Just speaking as someone who has done some development on a full-featured bibliographic database that includes this kind of contents and editions and titles -- these many-to-many parts -- it is a *b**ch*, and that was for a very small system with et al say they're thinking about it and that some of the back-end work on collections has been to revamp their database back end to make it more hospitable for future upgrades like the one proposed here. But a fully fledged system like the one discussed here -- well, I think we ought not expect it any time soon. And I think if we got it, that should be the go-nuclear moment when Tim et al ask for more than the $25 lifetime fee to add on the newer functionality -- I'd be delighted to pony up an additional $100, say, for that functionality.

Anyway, all that is to say that, yes, 24, 25, 26, half-assed solutions often become long-term half-asses, but in this instance, I wouldn't mind having a single CK field dedicated to anthology contents, that did not attempt to take on the whole series-work-title-volume-edition-contents mess.

I'm just sort of thinking out loud here. If short stories, poems, etc. were treated as first class items (as andyl suggests) each would almost always (with the exception of things like The Fellowship of the Ring) have to be entered manually. Which would probably be fine because the users that clamor for this sort of thing would probably be comfortable doing so. But without the old functionality of the green "Add to your library" plus sign, EVERY person that wanted to have these works would have to manually add them (which is ridiculous when someone else has already gone through the labor of creating these records, especially when the numbers are great, such as the Norton Anthology of American Literature cited above). In some people's opinions, this would "pollute" the author pages with a lot of minor works. It would be nice if there could be a CK field to designate what kind of work each work is (book, short story, poem, essay, etc.) and have sub-sections on the author page to reflect this (hey, I really like this idea independent of this discussion!). So there's a few non-minor problems right there.

Then you could create two CK fields: Contains and Contained within. Now, how do you link to a work within these fields? These wouldn't be like other CK entries; you probably wouldn't want the link to go to a CK search page, but the works page instead. Touchstones aren't an acceptable solution--they're too buggy. People often don't check that they go where they want them to go. When the title uses fairly common words, the list generated is enormous and the desired title may not come up at all. So perhaps we could use a manual link to the main works page. Is it possible for LT to pull up the title for display when given a link? And revert to the link when someone clicks the edit pencil? I'm not a programmer, but it seems possible. But don't work pages change sometimes? When multiple works are combined? So what may be a working link to a work one time may not work next time. Could be messy. Then, should reciprocal fields auto-populate (i.e., if work A contains work B, should work B automatically say it's contained within work A)? How difficult would that be to program? I'm not sure. It would also be nice to display titles AND authors (for multiple author anthologies, for example), but that just doubles the complexity of the problem.

I would love to see this functionality, but it seems like it would be a fairly complex task. I agree with andyl that "partial solutions tend to become permanent temporary fixes" (I'm still wait for proper author disambiguation). I don't want to see that. So, it seems to me that adding the TOC into tags or the book description will have to be the workaround for now. Tags have the advantage of being searchable, but the book description has a bit more prominence (unless enough people start using tags that it shows up in the works' main tag cloud) and organization. Neither is perfect, so I hope this is on TPTB's agenda someday.

The other entry issue is:

All copies of the same work SHOULD (barring bad combinations of "Selected Works" and the like) contain the same short stories, etc. So if someone (bluetyson, probably) has already done all the legwork of associating all the stories in a given Best Science Fiction of the Year work with that work, I and others with that work should be able to "know" that automatically, and have them appear in our catalogs if we want, rather than reinventing the wheel by re-entering all of the same stories.

I actually think another fielded wiki like Common Knowledge might be a better model for this sort of many-to-many relationship.

26> Short stories should be cataloged as works, that's the right way to do it

I seem to remember Tim commenting at one point that, for technical reasons, he would not want to see the contents of books (stories, essays, poems...) being catalogued as separate works -- that a separate mechanism would have to be developed to handle this. (Pace: I realize that a small set of members already do this today.) If I remember correctly, this was in the midst of a thread exploring the possible use of "contained within" relationships between books, such as those mentioned above.

I wish I remembered his precise comments -- this was something like two years ago, so I entertain no illusions that a Talk search would be of any assistance...

Tim, if you read this, would you mind telling us what your thoughts are about this today?

One major advantage of defining "contained"/"contained within" relationships will, of course, be the ability to filter recommendations so that members are not recommended a work if 1) it is contained within a work they already own, or 2) it contains only works that they already own.

This is currently a problem with omnibuses, multi-volume works, trilogies, etc.

I would hazard a guess that, if these relationships were implemented within CK, they would be less likely to be integrated into the recommendations engine...although I wouldn't rule it out. Does anyone remember if series information is being utilized when making recommendations?

32> I think this is the thread you were talking about - Anyone want to have a relationship?. A much better means of Talk search than LT's is to use Google with site:librarything.com (I searched for 'relationship contained'). Though it would still be interesting to know what Tim's current thoughts are.

and 33> YES! Recommendations, series lists, authors' book lists...anywhere green checks appear. Maybe gray or yellow checks (hmmm, colorblind concerns...) to indicate you have part of this book (as in two volumes that are contained in a three-volume omnibus)? That's a major part of why I want this relationship. The other part is figuring out whether I have all of the short stories in a set that got republished in random collections - Keith Laumer's Retief series, for instance. Sometimes with title changes, just to spice things up. Bah.

One prerequisite for this is a better system for relating editions to works. For example, my copy of Hobbes' Leviathan has a lengthy introduction by C. B. Macpherson, setting Hobbes' work in its intellectual context. This introduction is an important "contained-in" element of the book that I have, but it's not part of a lot of other people's instances of Leviathan. So under the current works system, it would require separating different editions as separate works.

The same problem exists with literary anthologies, of course, where the 3rd edition might not contain exactly the same set of stories as the 5th edition.

35: Yup, that's why such a revamp would need to have a "related to" type of thing that would cover similar works and translations and the like.

I also have a few SF anthologies which were published with the same title but different contents in the US and UK, just to throw another bug in the works. There are so many complications. *Sigh*

ETA, I almost forgot, but there are sites like the ISFDB and locus index that already contain contents lists.

Here's one I have found useful for sci-fi anthologies/collections:
http://www.philsp.com/homeville/ISFAC/0start.htm#TOC

"An index to 3,900 SF anthologies and single-author collections published before 1984, containing over 38,000 stories by 3,880 authors."

21, 25 -- I agree strongly with andyl. Short stories, essays and other short works need to be represented as works in a way that doesn't clutter the author page.

And all that doesn't even get to the question of works in an omnibus edition containing multiple novels!