Help:How to change a story in a collection

This page is a help or manual page for the ISFDB database. It describes standards or methods for entering or maintaining data in the ISFDB database, or otherwise working with the database. Other help pages may be found via the category below. To discuss what should go on this page, use the talk page. If, after exploring the Help system, you still have a question, please visit the Help desk and let us know. We probably know the answer, but we need your help to know what we left out of the help pages. If you are new to editing the ISFDB, please see Help:Getting Started. For more on this and other header templates, see Header templates.

Changing Content Entries

If you come upon a Publication record in which the content entries do not match exactly what is in your verifiable copy of the same pub, you will want to update that record. The way the ISFDB works, any changes to a Title record (i.e. a story, essay, novel, interview, etc) will impact how that title is displayed in ALL publications in which that title is printed. Thus, if you have a UK edition of a collection where the title of Clifford D. Simak's story "Neighbor" is spelled "Neighbour", changing the spelling to "Neighbour" would change the way the story appears in all publications and corrupt our data. In order to prevent this from happening, the Edit Publication screen will not let you change titles that have appeared in multiple publications: such titles will be grayed out and not editable except for the page number field. If a Title has appeared in only one publication, e.g. a story that has never been reprinted, then you will be able to edit its fields directly.

In cases when you want your Title changes to apply to all publications, e.g. if you want to change the date of a story, you can change it in the Edit Title screen.

When making a content change in the Edit Publication screen that applies to the way the Title appears in that publication only, follow the "add-remove-merge" method described below.

The Method

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

1. Go to the publication that you wish to edit and choose "Edit This Pub" from the Editing Tools menu.
   1. At the bottom of the Content section, you'll see the [Add Title] button. Clicking on it will create a set of fields to enter one new content entry.
   2. Enter the information for the new title, completing as many fields of which you're certain. In this case, you would enter: page 226, Neighbour, 1954-00-00, SHORTFICTION, novelette, Clifford D. Simak.
   3. Suggestion - If you are updating many titles it is helpful to set the page number for the old titles as "NA", "Remove", "Delete", "***", anything to distinguish the titles you wish to remove in the next step. 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.
   4. Click [Submit Data]. Wait for moderator approval of the publication edit and/or proceed to the next step.
2. Go back to the original publication record and click “Remove Titles From This Pub” in the Editing Tools menu.
   1. Look for the old version of the title, in this case “Neighbor, SHORTFICTION , Clifford D. Simak” and click the checkbox for that title record.
   2. Click [Submit Data].
3. Wait for moderator approval of your publication update and remove-title submissions. Once both have been approved, you will probably need to merge the newly created title record with any existing title record, or mark it as a variant title if the story was published with different titles or author credits in different publications. If you're unfamiliar with merging go to Help: How to merge titles. If you're unfamiliar with creating variant titles see Help:How to record a variant title.