Series are admittedly a mess. Part of the mess has to do with how one defines a series, part has to do with different ways of representing series in the metadata.
In library data, a series is generally only recorded when it is a formal numbered series, and those are of the form: $a Author $t Title $v Number (most are just title and number) I think these get brought into OL as: - "Series title, number" - "Great books, v. 23" Only recently have some libraries started to create series entries for things like Harry Potter and other groups of books that have common themes. These are given the same formatting as formal series. Amazon unfortunately puts the series in the title field, in parentheses, so these don't get into OL as series at all: - Understanding Literature (Scribner literature series) AND they mess up the titles and keep the books from merging. (AAArgh!) If there are multiple series, it seems that they should be in different series fields. I personally would prefer that the series title and number be in separate fields (like OL has done for numbering in tables of contents) because that way it would be easier to create a page for the entire series, given that the series titles would be identical in that case, and they aren't when the number is included in the series field. It would be great to have a page for the Harry Potter series or the Discworld series or the Great Books series. Since that isn't how it is, I would probably opt for - series title, number with "number" including the designation, such as "v." for "volume" or "part" if that's what is on the item. I agree that some degree of "helpful suggestion" would be good, and if not heavy-handed wouldn't turn off the folks who hate being told what to do. kc On 6/17/12 2:23 PM, Ben Companjen wrote: > Hi, > > How do people enter series and (optional) part numbers? > > I hope there is a standard way of entering this information (you need > to be in Librarian mode to be able to see the series field), but I've > seen several ways: > - "The Story of Civilization, Part III" is the example. > - "Series name -- number" is in many Canadian microform editions. > - "Harry Potter (5)" and similar is another form. > > The example is simple and does not provide guidance on what to do when > there is a comma in the title or whether to add "Part" or stick to a > number. And books may be part of several series - the /type/edition > supports multiple series - but what delimiter should be used to enter > multiple series+parts? > I know there are no rules for this (maybe there's an exception for the > delimiter), but it sometimes makes it difficult to decipher the > meaning from the contents of records. > > Ben > _______________________________________________ > Ol-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to > [email protected] > -- Karen Coyle [email protected] http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
