User talk:Breity

Welcome!

Hello, Breity, and welcome to the ISFDB Wiki! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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Novels to collections transmographication

Thanks for submitting all that data! One quick note about changing Novels to Collections. When you pull up a Novel publication using "Edit This Publication", you usually see just one fiction title listed in the Content section, plus the odd introduction/foreword. If you change that Novel Title in the Content section to the first story in the collection, it will zap the Novel Title record instead of converting it into a Collection Title record. Thus it will no longer appear on the Summary Bibliography page. We are thinking about making the software handle these situations better, but for now, please change the Novel record in the Content section to a Collection record of the same title and then add the short fiction stuff at the end. Thanks! Ahasuerus 17:53, 4 Jan 2007 (CST)

Oh dear, I am really not doing a good job of explaining this :( I'll give it another shot in a few hours after taking care of a couple of unrelated fires, but for now let me just answer the series question. Yes, please mark short fiction pieces as belonging to their proper series. Keep in mind that short stories may be reprinted in all kinds of other collections, anthologies, magazines, etc. As long as we indicate which series they belong to, their series name will appear next to their titles (in parentheses) when they show up in books/magazines that are not exclusively dedicated to one series. Thanks! Ahasuerus 00:50, 5 Jan 2007 (CST)

Gotcha re: series. I know you have like fifty billion other things to do, but it would be really nice to have some sort of distinguisher on the series bibliography page between which items are novels and which items are short fiction (like how Locus does it). Otherwise it makes it look like there are ten more books to run out and buy to make a complete set :-), and you don't know which is which unless you actually click on each title to see if they're a novel or not. Breity 02:33, 5 Jan 2007 (CST)

The Summary Bibliography page does indicate whether a work is a Collection ("C") or Short Fiction ("SF", although we may need a different abbreviation for obvious reasons :-) The Series page is way behind the Summary page and lacks much of the logic that the latter has. It doesn't even display pseudonyms or variant titles. Once Al is done fine-tuning the Summary page, he will go back and synchronize the Series page and all the other pages out there, but for now it can be quite confusing :(

As far as our Amazing Novel-to-Collection Transmogrifier goes, the key here is to understand that each "text" in the ISFDB, be it a novel or a story, must have a Title record. Title records include basic information about each book/story like the year it first appeared, what series it is a part of, synopsis, etc. In addition, each Title may be linked to one or more Publication, which is a physical manifestation of the Title. Publication records contain data about physical books/magazines like price, cover artist, ISBN, binding, publisher, etc. For Novel Titles, Publications are usually standalone editions or appearances in omnibuses. For short story Titles, Publications can be single author collections, anthologies, chapterbooks or magazine/newspaper appearances. Essays can pop up all over the place, including Novel Publications, e.g. introductions, afterwords, etc.

The next thing to keep in mind -- and this is the trickiest part -- is that collections, anthologies and omnibuses all have Titles as well as one or more Publications (editions) associated with them. The rule of thumb here is that as long as the fiction content (new introductions and such do not count) of a Publication remains the same as that of previous Publications, it should be filed under the same title. However, if fiction content has changed, e.g. one of the Wagner titles that you worked on had 2 stories added in a later edition, then the book should be made into a separate Title and linked to the original Title using the Variant Title approach.

A Publication that is labeled "Novel" will contain one (and only one) fiction Title and, optionally, one or more essays, e.g. introductions, prefaces, afterwords, etc. You will see them all when you pull up a Novel Publication in "Publication Edit". Omnibus Publications will always contain one Omnibus Title and at least two novel Titles. You will see the Novel Titles, but not the Omnibus Title in Publication Edit -- rest assured that it's still there, just non-editable. Collection/Anthology Publications will always contain a Collection Title and at least two fiction Titles, at least one of them a short fiction Title. Again, you will not see the Collection/Anthology Title in the Publication Edit Screen. This is potentially confusing and may be revisited.

For now, when editing a Novel Publication and trying to convert it to a Collection Publication, the easiest way to get it done is via two steps. First, pull it up using the Publication Edit form and change the Publication Type up top from "Novel" to "Collection" and also the Title Type in the Content section from "Novel" to "Collection". Once the change has been approved, you will have a properly configured Collection Publication and a Collection Title. You can then pull it up in Publication Edit again and add the individual stories. Alternatively, you can combine the two steps, i.e. change the Publication Type and the Title Type to "Collection" and then add the stories after the Collection title in the Content section. The important thing here is that the Novel Title in the Content section is converted to a Collection Title instead of getting converted to the first story in the collection.

Please let me know if this makes any sense and we will try to update our Help text accordingly. It's not that we are trying to make editing painful, it's just that the underlying data dependencies are not always trivial and we are trying to hide some of the complexities from the editors -- with mixed success. Thanks! 13:24, 5 Jan 2007 (CST)

John Farris's "Horrorshow"

Quick question: Is the title of this novella "Horrorshow" (as indicated in Locus) or "horrorshow"? Thanks! Ahasuerus 13:35, 5 Jan 2007 (CST)

I apologize for not getting back to you earlier -- I haven't had a chance to log in for several days. Yes, it should be lowercase -- at least it is in the mass market paperback of SCARE TACTICS that I own, whereas all the other short story titles in it are normal title case. Also, Babbage Press's recent-ish collection by him called ELVISLAND http://www.babbagepress.com/html/21-6.html has it as lowercase as well.

And thanks for your in-depth response! I will digest it when next I get a chance to enter data into the isfdb (hopefully this evening). Thanks again! Breity 08:00, 9 Jan 2007 (CST)

Novels to collections transmographication (ibid)

I just approved a publication update for The Attraction where you changed the publication type from NOVEL to COLLECTION. Please note that the parent title and publication types should match. (the exception is essays, shortfiction, ect. That you use as parts of longer publications). Right now the title is a NOVEL and the publication is a COLLECTION. It mostly works but if you look at the publication you’ll see there is no link back to the title because the logic to figure out a parent title looks for title-types that match the publication-type.

I suspect in this case it would be ok to call the publication a novel even though it contains an additional story. From it’s cover the book is mainly the story “The Attraction” and the fact that it happens to also contain “The Necromancer” is a bonus but that should not automatically make the thing a “collection.” Marc Kupper 02:15, 11 Jan 2007 (CST)

Update to the note - Your following update for Nightmare House also changed a NOVEL to a COLLECTION. I changed it back to a NOVEL so you can see how the publication links back to it's parent title when the publication and title types match. Marc Kupper 02:20, 11 Jan 2007 (CST)

Hi Mark,

The problem is that there is a novel called THE ATTRACTION, and a semi-collection which contains the novel THE ATTRACTION... which is *also* called THE ATTRACTION (the same thing occurred with NIGHTMARE HOUSE). The Leisure editions of both are collections that also contain the novel of the same title published earlier as a standalone novel in a limited edition by a small press. Which is a righteous nightmare for bibliographers. :-)

In any event, I understand what you are saying. I had figured that the publication pointed to a specific title and vice versa (though a title can point to several publications) by using the record #s, as the record #s are unique identifiers. I didn't realize that there was a search involved to find the title/publication link when displaying the bibliography screens. My apologies! Breity 02:40, 11 Jan 2007 (CST)

Breity, I’m with you on that and I myself have not dug into the db schema enough to understand just how authors, titles, publications get linked. There are searches involved in some places and other times it’s direct references using record numbers. Each time I see the “wave hands” explanation it seems to make sense at the time though.

I agree the reprints, or even a first printing, that include an extra story are messy from a bibliographic viewpoint. How about this for an idea; We’ll create a new title called “The Attraction (includes “The Necromancer”)” and make that a collection. The existing “The Attraction” title would be used for publications that just had the story “The Attraction” and the new title record would be used for this reprint. At the publication level the title would be “The Attraction” as that’s exactly what the book states and it would be a collection that includes both the original “The Attraction” title record “The Necromancer” shortfiction title. (the reason for linking to the orginal “The Attraction” is so that the publication list for the “The Attraction” title will include the reprint as it does contain the story “The Attraction.”

In case you are wondering on how to do that in ISFDB – it’s easy, from the existing The Attraction title click on … oops! It used to be easy in there was a function called “unmerge titles” that would go through the publications and for each one create an independent title record. You could then rename and/or merge the title records as needed. Well, the unmerge function is gone and so I guess we are stuck with doing a new-publication to generate the new title records. It seems less work to new-publication the original novels rather than the collections and then we’ll rename the existing titles to have “(includes …)” and change them to collections. Marc Kupper 14:43, 11 Jan 2007 (CST)

(update) In thinking about this for a bit I believe it's better to make the “The Attraction (includes “The Necromancer”)” title and publication a NOVEL rather than COLLECTION as it really is a novel that happens to have an additional short story and also so that this title will sort next to the original novel rather than be separated out into the Collections part of an author's bibliography. Marc Kupper 15:17, 11 Jan 2007 (CST)