On 09/06/2013 06:08 AM, Karen Coyle wrote: > The edit screen does not appear to allow one to input additional titles, > although I don't think that the metadata format would have a problem > with that. I will add this as a suggestion: add a field for "additional > titles" -- this would be useful for many books whose titles can have > variations.
I know this from some edits I made yesterday: there are two fields in Librarian Mode, one with the text "Is it known by any other titles? (Perhaps in another language?)", and another "What's the original book?", if you select "Yes, it's a translation". The whole thing is confusing to me, though. These fields are only available on the edition's page, and not the work's page. For "Dead Souls" <http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7084842M/Dead_Souls>, I ended up putting the transliteration of the alternate title in both fields. I think this book is a particularly good use case for measuring whether OL has sufficiently ironed out the issues here. There's enough here to raise a few questions. * The work in question seems to be most widely known as Dead Souls in the English-speaking sphere. * The original work was retitled before publication (apparently, due to political issues in the Russian Empire, according to Wikipedia) to "Похожденія Чичикова, или мертвые души". Dead Souls ("мертвые души") is actually the subtitle. * The original title is variously translated as "The Wandering of Chichikov", "The Adventures of Tchitchikov/Chichikov", or "Chichikov's Journey". * "Похожденія Чичикова […]" is what appears on the title page to the original 1842 edition (and at least 1846, as well). The use of "і" seems to be particular to Ukrainian, though. and today the work seems to be more commonly referred to as "Похождения […]" compared to "Похожденія […]". * Today, some letters in "мертвые души" may be replaced with their accented forms <http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D1%91%D1%80%D1%82%D0%B2%D1%8B%D0%B5_%D0%B4%D1%83%D1%88%D0%B8>. * There are several ways to transliterate the title. One of them appears in the handwritten text in the IA scan of that copy's title page. The free form text field for the title in the "Yes, this is a translation" area in Librarian Mode should probably go away. Specifying that it's a translation and the source language should be sufficient and non-destructive, given that the works page is meant to list all editions... If it's known that the translator worked from a *specific* edition (or editions) during the translation process, it would probably be best to include an optional field for that, which can be filled by a widget listing the editions in that language. But not a free form text field. Librarian Mode's alternate title field in its current form should probably go away, too. The help text asks "Is it known by any other titles? (Perhaps in another language?)". This is mistargeted, since if it is, it's likely because there's an edition available in that language, which should be listed on the work's page, anyway. Best, I think, would be to add a multi-valued alternate *titles* field to the work's page itself, to list any other titles that don't come verbatim from a published edition's listed title or subtitle. (This includes things like the handwritten transliteration from above.) This should prevent data duplication. For example, for Dead Souls, listing "Chichikov's Journey" as an alternate title for every edition is wasteful, since it can simply be listed as an alternate title on the work's page itself, and every edition can chain up to it. -- Colby Russell _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list - Ol-discuss@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-discuss@archive.org/ To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-discuss-unsubscr...@archive.org
