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 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 will impact how that title is displayed in ALL publications in which that story (or essay) is printed.

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. If you change the title record to match your copy, you will impact how the story is displayed in all ten publications. Obviously, you don't want to do that, since you probably don't have access to all ten publications and can't verifiably prove that the story appears as "Neighbour" in all instances.

Sometimes you may want to impact all ten records. This is usually for data fields that are “about” the story, such as the date, story length, synopsis, notes, etc. In that case, just make the changes, submit them and a moderator will simply review and approve the submission.

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 a title record. 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:

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 varient 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 varient titles see Help:How to record a variant title.

An Exception to the Method

There is an exception to this "add and remove" method. If a search reveals that this is the one and only printing of this title, you can edit the record from either its title record or from an edit of the one and only pub in which it appears. For example, you see that this essay "Here Be There Dragons: The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker and Other Mysteries of an Explored Planet" was recorded without its subtitle. Because there is only one record of its printing (in Analog, October 2008), you can either edit the title record, or edit its content entry in the pub record. But again, you must be absolutely certain that this is its only record of printing.