Help:Screen:EditSeries

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.

In the series bibliography display, there is a navigation bar link to "Edit Series". Clicking on this link will display the Edit Series page. This page has six fields:

• Name: The name of the series. A series can have only one name, so if two or more names are equally well known (e.g. one name is used in the UK and another in Australia), the only option is to list them all in a slash delimited format, e.g. Moon Singer / Free Trader / Moon Magic
• Transliterated Name: Populate only if the name of the series is spelled using a non-Latin alphabet/script. If you know the Romanized form of the name, enter it in this field. If there is more than one possible Romanization, click on the '+' button next to the field label and enter the other Romanized spellings of the name. You can click on the '+' button as many times as necessary.
• Parent: See discussion below.
• Series Parent Position: The relative position of the current series within its parent series. This is particularly useful when one series clearly follows another within their parent superseries.
• Web Page: URL of a Web page or Web site about this series. This is a repeating field and you can enter as many Web pages as necessary.
• Note: A free text note describing this series. Limited HTML and templates can be used in this field -- see Help:Using Templates and HTML in Note Fields for more details.
• Note to Moderator: An optional note to the reviewing moderator to clarify any issues that may arise when approving the submitted data. Any data entered into this field will not become a part of the permanent database record.

The "Parent" field allows you to define nested series by specifying that one series contains another. The ISFDB supports any depth of series nesting, so you can create a series that is part of a series, which is part of a series, which is part of a ... ad infinitum. One thing that is not supported is having the same title belong to more than one series. This can be a problem in certain cases where a book clearly belongs to two or more series, but at this point there is no workaround.

In order to put a series in a "parent series" (also known as a "superseries"), display the Edit Series page for the child series. The Parent field will be blank. Enter the name of the parent series in the "Parent" field and your series will become part of the parent series. Note that if a series with the name that you entered in the "Parent" field doesn't exist, a new series with that name will be created automatically. You can then repeat the process for all other sub-series (also known as "child series") that belong to the same superseries. If you want to remove a sub-series from its parent series, pull up the sub-series in the Edit Series page and delete the name of the parent series.

Note that:

• Changing the Name field changes the name of the series for all books currently in this series.
• Changing the Parent field does NOT change the name of the parent series. It merely makes the currently displayed series a sub-series of another parent series.
• If the specified Parent series exists, changing the Parent field re-links the Named series to that parent.
• If the specified Parent series does not exist, a new Parent series will be created, and the currently displayed series will be linked to that parent.

See also: Help:How to work with series and Publication Series