Help:How to change a story in a collection
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Changing Content Entries
If you come upon a pub 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. Due to the ISFDB's database structure, any changes to a title record (i.e. story, essay, novel, interview, etc) will impact how that title is displayed in ALL publications in which that title is printed. Since it's rarely a good idea to have changes in one publication affect other publications, the Edit Publication screen will only let you change titles that have only appeared in the publication that you are editing. Titles that have also appeared in other publications will be "display only" and not editable, although you will be able to edit the page number field and the story length field.
Sometimes you may want to impact all ten records. This is usually for data fields that are “about” the story, such as the date, synopsis, notes, etc. In that case, you will want to find the Title and change the incorrect data in the Edit Title screen.
However, when it comes to the title field itself, 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 is stated in the publication and ISFDB would then relink the publication to the title record for Neighbour. Unfortunately, that’s not how ISFDB currently works and we must use the following method of changing the way a title record appears in a publication. It may take several submissions before you are comfortable with this method, but it shouldn't be long before you're doing it without a second thought.
The Method
Here are the steps to change the title of a story that’s incorrectly listed in the contents of a publication:
- Go to the publication that you wish to edit and choose "Edit This Pub" from the Editing Tools menu.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Click [Submit Data]. Wait for moderator approval of the publication edit and/or proceed to the next step.
- Go back to the original publication record and click “Remove Titles From This Pub” in the Editing Tools menu.
- Look for the old version of the title, in this case “Neighbor, SHORTFICTION , Clifford D. Simak” and click the checkbox for that title record.
- Click [Submit Data].
- 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.