R&S Example page/Serials in Chapterbooks

I want to draw your attention to R. A. Lafferty's My Heart Leaps Up, which was serialized in 5 pamphlets/chapbooks over a couple of years. Whoever first entered these did them as type SERIAL, with CHAPTERBOOK publications, and I have kept them that way while fixing the chapterbooks and adding data from OCLC and Locus online. The titles are: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. Each has two publications, one a signed and limited ed.

These seem to work reasonably well. Do people think this is a reasonable use of the CHAPTERBOOK type? -DES ^Talk 21:59, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

I think this is a perfect use of the chapterbook type. It's what the type was created for, IMHO. Small pamphlets with softcovers with less than 100 pages. It's a better example of a chapbook than a hardcover limited edition novella published by PS Publishing. But I suppose the type can handle as wide a range of bindings as the NOVEL type does. When we made CHAPTERBOOK a container type, it was because we came to a realization that it's a different way of defining the work and not the presentation. My only concern now is how it appears on Lafferty's summary page, as both a serial and a chapterbook. But I can't think of anyway of getting around it. Each pamphlet was titled as a part of the complete work, and the work was published serially. Just as a novel would appear as a serial in different issues of a magazine, this was published in different "issues" of chapbooks. MHHutchins 22:20, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

Your examples seem to be broken - what has "Hidden Empire" by "Kevin J. Anderson" (your part 5 example) got to do with anything? BLongley 22:50, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

Fixed. That's what happens when you use {{P}} with a title record number. Arrgh. -DES ^Talk 23:07, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

I think the overall approach is appropriate, but there are a couple of things to consider:

1. The Chapterbook Publication titles are My Heart Leaps Up, Chapters 1 & 2,, Chapters 3 &4, etc, so we may want to change the Chapterbook Title titles to match
2. We have a fake Non-genre Title record for My Heart Leaps Up, which probably exists to force the lexical match logic to kick in. Once that logic is gone, the Non-genre Title will become an orphan and we will presumably want to delete it, which will leave us with no immediate indication that this Serial is not SF. This is related to the way we handle Non-genre information: we assume that "Non-genre" always means "Non-genre Novel", which is not always the case. I hope that we will address this problem as part of a larger revamp of the Title record, which will involve moving "jvn" and "nvz" to their own fields, making Storylen into a dropdown list, doing something about the Omnibus information etc. Ahasuerus 00:11, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

On the current display, I'm not sure why the chapterbooks don't appear in the right order whereas the rest do. And I really don't like each one appearing 3 times - that's improvable by not entering Serial contents, the chapterbooks alone convey most of the information perfectly well, except that if they were properly named they wouldn't indicate that we have the complete set entered. The nongenre kludge does need a look too. BLongley 17:32, 3 August 2009 (UTC)