User talk:Grendelkhan

Hello and welcome aboard! I remember your many posts on the Forum and glad to see that you are applying the same diligence to the database :-) Ahasuerus 20:02, 15 May 2006 (CDT)

Thanks! I hope to get some quality work done here. I'll be sure to bug you and/or Al when I have questions I don't see answered in the wiki. grendel|khan 12:31, 16 May 2006 (CDT)

Merging authors and library editions

• The easiest way to merge two authors (that I know of) is to merge all of their respective records. You can do it by running a custom Advanced Search in the navbar and then merging records cross-authors. When the last record is merged, the software should (hopefully!) delete the orphan Author. Seems to have worked for me so far.

• I don't think we have a standard for "library editions" vs. "hardcover" vs. anything else at this time. I suggest we discuss it at Bibliographic Rules.

Have to run, be back later! :) Ahasuerus 12:52, 16 May 2006 (CDT)

Translation troubles

I have posted some ideas at the bottom of Bibliographic Rules. Ahasuerus 18:58, 16 May 2006 (CDT)

Ace paperbacks

Post-1968 Ace paperbacks are tricky since, as Mike Christie wrote in the relevant Wikipedia article just a couple of weeks ago:

In January 1969, Ace switched to a numeric coding system. The code depended on the title of the book; or specifically on the first significant word in the title. For example, Tom Purdom's The Barons of Behavior was published by Ace in about 1972 as serial number 04760. The first letter of "Barons" is "B", so the code assigned is fairly early in the numeric range 00000 to 99999. This procedure for assigning numeric codes was in use at Ace at least into the early 1990's, and may still be in use today. For Ace doubles, one of the titles was selected and used to determine what serial number should be used. For example, 11560 is the Ace double The Communipaths by Suzette Haden Elgin, backed with Louis Trimble's The Noblest Experiment in the Galaxy. The serial number here is derived from The Communipaths; a serial number derived from the Trimble would have been about 58000.

For the later numeric series titles, the number is also part of the ISBN. To form the ISBN (if it exists) for one of these books one prefixes "0" for English language/US, and "441" (Ace's publisher number), to the serial number. The last digit can then be calculated with an ISBN check digit calculator. For example, Christopher Stasheff's Escape Velocity has serial number 21599; the ISBN is 0-441-21599-8.

Having said that, Pandora's Books, Ltd., a well established genre bookstore, claims that this edition was published in 1970. I suggest that regardless of whether we put "1970" in the Year field or the Note field, we add a comment to the effect that the exact date is not known at this time. Ahasuerus 08:20, 17 May 2006 (CDT)

Capturing the tangled web of non-SF authors

Hi hi! When you delete non-SF Publications and Works (Scooby-Doo, RPG, comics, etc), could you please add the names of their Authors to the respective project pages? That way we can later find less obvious Works that don't have give away keywords in their titles like "X-Men", "Scooby-Doo", etc :) Thanks! Ahasuerus 16:37, 22 May 2006 (CDT)

Will do. I try to traverse them in a way that I don't delete a publication unless I have its authors open already, so I can make sure that I'll cover all the authors spanning out from the first. (Does that make sense? I'm not sure how else to phrase it.) Do we want to keep track of authors who have been deleted, so that we can filter the monthly imports against them, or do we not care about them if they've been purged? grendel|khan 01:11, 23 May 2006 (CDT)

Oh yes, it does make sense. That's what I tried doing with RPG related Authors at first, but there were just too many of them: A leads to B and C, then B leades to K, L and M while C leads to Q, X, Y and Z, who lead to even more Authors, etc. That's why I started cataloging them in the first place :) As to whether we want to use the list in the future to filter new Publications out or at least to flag them as "suspect", that's still an open question, but if we have a master list, then we can always use it later on. Ahasuerus 09:08, 23 May 2006 (CDT)