User:Chavey

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See Darrah Chavey's ISFDB record for details.

Who Am I?

Darrah Chavey

Supporter of WisCon, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and the Carl Brandon Society.

My specialty is SF by women authors, especially works before the mid-80's. For the current status of this project, see my SF Gender page.

For personal information about me, see my personal home page.

Ongoing Projects

Personal notes for projects I want to get to:

1. Wikipedia Links: Look at Wikipedia's Fantasy Novels, Speculative Fiction pages, Science Fiction pages, and Science Fiction Novels, and verify we include all available Wikipedia links.
2. Adding data from the Contento1 database. Status: Currently entering collection title data (but not contents yet).
3. Adding magazines before 1970. Adding early magazines, or missing issues, covers, and contents for those magazines. Initial efforts are focusing on magazines found in Locus/Homeville, which usually lists contents. Will then go on to early fanzines. Current Status.
4. Told to Children Series. Add titles to this series. See the publication series note there for links to books up to 1906.
5. Ancient works. Speculative fiction works prior to, say, 1850. See my Ancient Works page.
6. Women authors. Speculative fiction works by women. See my Gender page.
7. Non-Fiction publication series. Series that specialize in critique and analysis of SF&F, or have some volumes on this topic. This does not include non-fiction series devoted to: SF art; specific authors; specific characters or universes. See my Non-Fiction Series page for more details.
8. Scan book covers
9. International editions of Tiptree books
10. Identify the genders of as many authors as possible. Goal: Authors who have published at least one book (novel, collection, or anthology) before 1980. When not apparent, and no Wikipedia page, identify enough biographical data to justify an ISFDB "Bio" page, which includes the use of a gender-identifying personal pronoun.
11. Compare book collection with existing data
12. Read all the ISFDB documentation :-)
    Geez, do I have to go through all the archives too? Probably.
13. Enter data on missing fanzines? See my Fanzines page.
14. Enter any additional data from "Urania's Daughters" bibliography of women SF authors.
15. Extend my listing of User:Chavey/Authors_of_Color to other groups than just Native American authors

My FAQ

How to get the LCCN for a book:

Go to Library of Congress. Enter the title and, optionally, author. Click any book record (generally, one per publisher of the book), and the resulting page will have the LCCN near the end. The MARC codes, and an approach to using them to identify target audience, is discussed here.

Listing sources for biographies and author info:

When noting sources for Bio pages, Author pages, etc, use the {{Note}} and {{Ref}} templates (adapted and simplified from Wikipedia) to provide footnotes. They way to use them is:

1. Each source note (or other footnote) should be in a separate paragraph, starting with {{Note|<nn>}}, where <nn> represents the note number, starting at 1 and going up to as many notes as are needed.
2. In the body of the biography, where reference is made to the contents of a note, insert {{Ref|<nn>}} where <nn> represents the number of the corresponding note.

See Help:Contents/Purpose#Sources and the template pages linked above for more details.

This can also be used to list sources of the other biographical data, such as true names, birth/death dates, etc. These sources can be placed in the bibliographic page for the author. Documenting sources is really a good idea that we should do more often.

Merging Publication Series

There appears to be no "built-in" way to do this. Even if you Edit two series so they have the same name, there is no tool to merge those. Work-around: Open all of the books in the series that is to be dropped. Delete the publication series. Save and update their records. Open them all again, put in the new name (which may be the same as the old name). Now they've been added. If you had series numbers in them, they should be remembered. To be safe, though, open a screen showing the old series, then don't refresh that page until after you've verified the numbers were copied over.

Added contents to some of your verified publications

I used the WorldCat record to add the contents to your verified publication. Of course WorldCat doesn't record the page numbers, and I leave those to you if you wish to fill them in. Chavey 13:04, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Added contents from another edition

I am working on the Cleanup Report that complains about collections and anthologies that have no contents. Right now I'm importing contents for such works when we have another printing of the same book (by the same publisher) that includes the contents. Books verified by you for which I've done this are: verified publication. I haven't included page numbers unless the page count for the two printings was exactly the same, so some of these books will be missing that detail. If you have the time, I encourage you to verify this against your own copy. Chavey 16:48, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

My FAQ: Awards notes

Reviewing existing awards:

1. Analog Award: All awards verified to 2012. Need to add links to several unlinked awards.
2 Asimov's Reader's Poll Award:
3 Asimov's Undergraduate Award:
4 William Atheling Jr. Award:
5 Aurealis Award:
6 Aurora Award:
7 Australian Science Fiction Achievement Award:
8 Balrog Award:
9 Ray Bradbury Award for Dramatic Screenwriting:
10 Carl Brandon Society Award:
etc.

Integrating other Awards databases into ours:

• www.sfsignal.com, checked out in chronological order up to March 14, 2006.
• Incorporate data from the Locus page (old style).
• Incorporate data from the Locus page (new style).
• Incorporate data from File 770.
• Incorporate data from Wikipedia.

Honorable mention discussion:

'Honorable Mention' is award level 93. BLongley 11 October 2011 (UTC)

For the 2004 awards, I changed all of the "Honorable Mentions" to "Level 93". But they still don't show up as Honorable Mentions. The only change seems to be that now if I try to "Edit an Award" on that page, those 4 books don't show up at all! Chavey 11 October 2011 (UTC)

They do show up, but only on certain pages: Author Award Bibliography for instance. BLongley 12 October 2011 (UTC)

The thing that I find frustrating is that if I go to the 2003 page for Asimov's undergraduate award, I see the three top places, then a line that reads --- Honorable Mention -------, then the honorable mentions. But if I go to the equivalent page for the 2004 awards, I do not see that line, hence lose that information. Chavey 12 October 2011 (UTC)

I created an artificial story title "--- Honorable Mention -------", by the author "-" and put it in as a 9th runner-up for all of these later Asimov's awards. I think it's a reasonable workaround for now. Chavey 14 October 2011 (UTC)

I changed how I handled the "Honorable Mention" separator, using dummy awards instead of a dummy book (with lots of awards!). I can't make it italic, but at least it's not clickable, so I think it looks better. Chavey 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Awards not exclusively SF:

New Award: Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award

I added a new award to the "Awards" page. Of course we can't yet set the award links quite the way we would like to, since it's not in our short list of awards, but since there's only one category for this Award (that we care about), I just did a direct link to the winning book, instead of to an "Award Page", and then added the award mention to the Notes (since it's not generated automatically). Of course we'll be able to fix that eventually. But another point is that this award is an example where the award is not a "Spec Fic Award", but has often been given to a spec fic book. So I think we'd eventually like to include such awards, and I was hoping you could take a look at what I did and see if you think this is a reasonable approach (and goal). Chavey 6 November 2011 (UTC)

I think this is reasonable, and would be a good example of how to deal with awards that we don't want to cover exhaustively, like "Newberry medal" or "Smarties Award". BLongley 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Some stock replies

A Title Series has connections between the universe and characters from one book in the series to another, and has the property that even if the book was republished with a different title and by a different publisher, it would still "belong" to that series. (Think of "The Earthsea Trilogy" or "Chronicles of Narnia".) A Publication Series has to do with how a book is packaged, or presented, by the publisher. Specifically, if the same collection were republished with a different name, then it wouldn't "belong" to the series, which is the conclusive evidence that it's a Publication Series. Consider a book like Arkham Horror: The Lies of Silence. The phrase "Arkham Horror" is right there on the cover, and could be viewed as part of the name. But it's definitely part of an "Arkham Horror" series. But the universe the story is set in is The Lord of Nightmares. Now imagine that the book went out of print, and the author decided to publish it himself. Then it wouldn't be part of the "Arkham Horror" series anymore. But it would still be part of the "The Lord of Nightmares" universe. And that's what makes it part of "The Lord of Nightmares" Title Series, and part of the "Arkham Horror" Publication Series: The title series is a permanent identification, based on content, while the publication series is dependent on the way the book was published. The confusion, I suspect, comes because of our use of "Title". To us, that phrase refers to something at a more general level than an individual publication, and largely independent of the "title" giving to a book.

You verified this publication, which contains a review of the chapbook YYY Usually, this would be an entered as a review of the story inside that chapbook, unless the review had something to do with the particular packaging of this chapbook (such as its cover). Could you check whether this review has been assigned to the correct item? It's showing up on this cleanup report. Thanks,

Some dates of country names

Technically, Mexico is "United Mexican States", France is "the French republic", Germany is "the Federal Republic of Germany", Russia is "the Russian Federation", Italy is "the Italian Republic", etc. But the consensus view is that using these official names would be excessive detail trumping "the common names". It is also far too likely to result in some editors using the formal name and other editors using the common name. So generally, we keep the "standard" simplifications of names of countries. We generally do not worry about "formal" name changes, unless those name changes are accompanied by changes in the national boundaries, or major changes in the type of government. The details for certain countries that have been worked out in discussions are shown below.

These don't always apply! Because national boundaries move, these place names are approximate only. For example, a city that is located in one of the countries listed below may not have been part of that country at some particular point in that country's history.

Colombia: "Gran Colombia", from August 30, 1821 to May 2, 1831; the "Republic of New Granada" from May 3, 1831-May 21, 1858; "Granadine Confederation" from May 22, 1858–Feb. 2, 1863; the "United States of Colombia" from Feb. 3, 1863–Aug. 3, 1886; and "Colombia" (officially, the Republic of Colombia) from Aug. 4, 1886 to the present.

England: "Kingdom of England" up to April 30, 1707. "England, Kingdom of Great Britain" from May 1, 1707 up to Dec. 31, 1800. "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland" from Jan. 1 , 1801 to the present, which we list as "England, UK" (no periods). (English country names in birth places are verified by a cleanup report.)

Ireland: "Kingdom of Ireland" up to 1801, then "Ireland, UK" up to Dec. 5, 1922. From there: "Northern Ireland, UK" to the present for that country. For the rest of that island: "Irish Free State" from 1922-12-06 to 1937-12-28; "Ireland" from 1937-12-29 to the present. The official name of "Ireland" changes to "Republic of Ireland" on 1949-04-18, but we do not use that formal name. (Irish country names in birth places verified as of 2016-05-25. Names are verified by a cleanup report, except it doesn't catch "Republic of Ireland".)

Netherlands: "Burgundian Netherlands", from 1384 to March 27, 1482; "Habsburg Netherlands", from March 28, 1482 to July 25, 1581; "Dutch Republic", from July 26, 1581 to Jan. 18, 1795; "Batavian Republic", from Jan. 19, 1795 to June 4, 1806; the "Kingdom of Holland" from June 5, 1806 to July 8, 1810, then "Netherlands" from July 9, 1810 to the present.

Russia: Prior to Nov. 2, 1721: "Russia"; "Russian Empire" from Nov. 2, 1721 to Sept. 13, 1917; "Russia" from Sept. 14, 1917 to Dec. 29, 1922; "Russia, USSR" from Dec. 30, 1922 to Dec. 25, 1991. "Russia" from Dec. 26, 1991 to the present.

Scotland: "Kingdom of Scotland" up to April 30, 1707. "Scotland, Kingdom of Great Britain" from May 1, 1707 up to Dec. 31, 1800. "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland" from Jan. 1 , 1801 to the present, which we list as "Scotland, UK" (no periods). (Scottish country names in birth places are verified by a cleanup report.)

Wales: "Wales, Kingdom of England" or "Principality of Wales, Kingdom of England" from 1536 to April 30, 1707. (Not all of what we think of as "Wales" was part of the "Principality of Wales".) "Wales, Kingdom of Great Britain" from May 1, 1707 up to Dec. 31, 1800. "Wales, UK" since then. A common mistake is to list a birth place as from "South Wales", "East Wales", "West Wales", or "North Wales". Those are regions, but have no political existence.