CK: Table of Contents / Chapter titles

Would like to be able to add a structural outline of a book / work in CK.

May have to make some allowance for differences between editions — Perhaps those could be noted in parentheses?

Many libraries show tables of contents in their catalogs inclding LOC and Worldcat. It would be nice to have a spot for them on LT. I have occasionally put Tables of Contents in the Book Description.

I think this discussion has been hashed over many times. A lot of people want full contents cataloguing - the contents exist as first class objects which can be tagged, have CK, reviews, ratings etc. Just having a list doesn't bring that much benefit - I already have contents lists in the comments for nearly all my anthologies, collections and fiction-containing magazines.

An official place to put that kind of stuff would be great. Who's up for finding me the motivation to use it??

I agree that it'd be nice to have somewhere official to list this, but I'm not sure CK is the best place for it as LT is currently structured, because CK is "work" level, whereas contents are to an important extent editions-level. Different copies/editions of a book (that are combined together as a "work" on LT) might have different introductions or other small differences in the contents etc. Or, translated editions have different chapter names, so even if I have the French copy of a book in my otherwise mostly English-language catalog, if it were in CK, I'd be seeing the English contents and not the French ones that actually reflected my book, etc. Even if the rule were that people only enter contents for the "core" book that's the same across editions, it seems like it would be very easy for people to edit this to match their copy of the book in ways that didn't match other people's copies, and it would be a pain to police. I could see something site-wide working if LT ever implements a kind of intermediate "editions" level below the work (so you could also indicate which edition of a work you had, and see shared data for that edition only), but otherwise I think individual-catalog level would be the way to go.

The languages argument fails, as it's a problem with CK in general.

It's possible to add multiple entries for a lot of the CK sections, so it could be marked for different editions... once LT supports them.

No, the languages problem is more complicated here than for the rest of CK due to the book-work difference. A contents list depends on which edition you have, and different language editions are one of the edition differences that will affect this. For instance Outline of a Theory of Practice won't have the same contents listing as Esquisse d'une theorie de la pratique (deliberately touchstoned to the same work), but that doesn't mean all readers on the English-language site have the English-language edition.

Different languages can affect anything in CK that isn't numbers (publication date). Characters, place names, titles, etc.

That's why that argument for keeping ToC out of CK doesn't make sense to me.

You're missing the point. It's not just a matter of language, it's a difference of editions. Translations often have stuff listed in the contents that isn't in the original, or vice-versa. For the work I mentioned there are whole chapters that are differently arranged or not present.

This is just one form of the edition problem for contents. Many works exist in multiple editions that have different contents (consider a textbook where the 7th edition has an added chapter that the 6th edition didn't have).

The suggestion certainly has been brought up several times - and not just in terms of ToC, but as a way to find short stories in anthologies and making the contained-in relationship stronger.

But from the very beginning - when CK was first introduced two years ago - the edition-specific nature vs. work nature of LT was a concern raised by the main developer of CK:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/21648#291495

I was looking for the more recent response he'd written a few months back where he'd said that CK just wasn't the appropriate place for such a thing and that LT needed to support something different for this type of information...not to mention the ordered nature of the information.

Yes, the languages/translations issue was an example of editions. Most CK data is general enough that it doesn't matter that much about which edition (including translation) you have. TOC is less general, and arguably more appropriate for (and would be more useful as) an individual-catalog-level field or some yet-to-be developed shared edition-level CK.

Right now, taking the inspiration from andyl's library collections, I've added table of contents lists in the comments field for my newest additions. I'd rather have a separate and separate-able field for this, in order to have titles and others listed and identifiable. I especially want table of contents for short story anthologies, but think it could be really useful for my non-fiction books too.

I normally put a Table of Contents in the LibraryThings Members' Descritption, the relatively few times that I bother to do this. (It helps to copy this from someplace else, rather than typing it in).

>I normally put a Table of Contents in the LibraryThings Members' Descritption

plus 1 for this. we have a user currently doing this as reviews without any line breaks and its really annoying.

I've taken a few years' hiatus from entering books into my librarything account while waiting on some form of table of contents to appear. As far as I can tell, there's still not a proper way to do it (other than putting the contents in comments). Are there any updates on plans for it?

With the current system, I would store such information in the Comments field. I did so for this entry: The Building of a Book. It is searchable. It meets my needs. It is also similar to what many OPAC systems do.

The value of knowing my inventory is too great to delay cataloging because of a missing input field.

I would also like to see an editions layer as was sometimes discussed if it will provide better discretion between my Dent-Dutton Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland and my Rand McNally Windermere Alice in Wonderland. Right now it is too hard to look at a list of the books I have/lack in a series because of the work level approach to this.

However, despite this, I catalog all of our collections. If a new feature comes down the road (like the addition of physical units, etc.) then I have another excuse to handle our books to improve the catalog.

Treat it like a positive, if you can.

James

#14

Some of the TOC sources do not have line breaks. I t takes more time to put the line breaks in, than it does to get all the info in.

#15

Tim did mention some plans a few years ago, but there hasn't been any visible progress yet.

Mention was made here https://www.librarything.com/topic/108796#2488811
Still no visible progress that I can find.
Any news from the random ether?

Sadly, there hasn't been a lot of progress with the RSIs here on LT. First the excuse was work on Tiny Cat, but now it's raising money, something important, but damn, I wish we could understand whether LT is still a going concern or not.

"I wish we could understand whether LT is still a going concern or not."
They seem to be adding better-paying clients (small libraries) so may have to service their needs first -- are there symptoms that we should export our libraries more frequently?

Yeah, that's probably a good idea.

Tim keeps hiring. That's a good sign, don't you think?