Help:How to change a story in a collection

How to change a story in a collection or anthology

Suppose someone wanted to update the publication Best Science Fiction Stories of Clifford D. Simak and to change the title of the story Neighbor into Neighbour. If you look at the Neighbor title record you will see that this story is included in ten different publications meaning any changes to the title record will impact how the story is displayed in all ten publications.

Sometimes you want all ten records to get impacted – usually this is for data fields that are “about” the story such as the date, storylen, synopsis, notes, etc. In that case, just make the changes and the odds are a moderator will just review/approve the thing without a second thought.

However, when it comes to data fields that are about the title itself and not the story then the changes should normally be more limited in scope. Ideally, an editor could go to a publication record and just change the spelling of Neighbor to Neighbour to match what stated in the publication and ISFDB would then relink the publication to the title record for Neighbour. Unfortunately, that’s not how ISFDB works at the moment meaning we are faced with a more tortuous path.

Here are the steps to change the title of a story that’s listed in the contents of a publication.

1. Bring-up the edit-publication page
   1. Click on [Add Title] that’s down at the bottom of the Contents section.
   2. Enter the information for the new title, in this case it would be page 226, Neighbour, 1954-00-00, SHORTFICTION, novelette, Clifford D. Simak.
   3. Click [Submit Data]
   4. Suggestion - If you are updating many titles it's been found to be helpful to set the page number for the old titles that you want to remove to something like, NA, (blank), Remove, Delete, etc. Wait for moderator approval of the publication edit and then proceed to the next step. Note that this is optional and if you are comfortable that you can keep track of the old/new titles then you can just move on to the next step without waiting for moderator approval of the publication edit.
2. Go back to the original publication record and click “Remove Titles From This Pub” in the navbar.
   1. Look for the old version of the title, in this case “Neighbor, SHORTFICTION , Clifford D. Simak” and click the checkbox for that line.
   2. Click [Submit Data]
3. Wait for moderator approval of your publication update and remove-title. Once approved you will need to merge the new title record for Neighbour with the existing record. ISFDB has several mechanisms available for this
   1. From the author’s bibliographic display page click “Dup Candidates” in the navbar, locate your story, Neighbour, in this case, set both check boxes, and merge them. If the two titles you want to merge are not spelled exactly the same then try the “fuzzy” mode of “Dup Candidates” (there’s a link at the top of the page for this) and see if that’ll group your titles.
   2. From the author’s bibliographic display page click “Titles” in the navbar, locate your story, Neighbour, in this case, set the for the shortfiction records, and merge them. The advantage of the “titles” method over “Dup Candidates” is that it can be used to merge title records that are dissimilar enough that the “dup” mechanism did not group them. A disadvantage is that “titles” only displays 100 per page and if the merge candidates are on two separate pages then you need to use one of the following method to merge these titles.
   3. From Advanced Search search for Neighbour by Simak, set the appropriate check boxes, and merge them. An advantage of this method is that you can use the and/or mechanism along with partial word scans to construct a search result that has a short list that includes titles you need to merge.
   4. Finally, sometimes the titles are dissimilar enough that you can’t get them grouped onto the same page using the methods outlined above. In that case, edit one of the titles so that its name matches the other (add a note to the moderator in the in title’s notes section), wait for approval, and merge the records using one of the methods listed above.