Best Practices

I came to this group looking for the Best Practices thread. It's not here. So this seems like good excuse to create links.

New Series: Best Practices
New Series: Best Practices 2

Also...
New Series 1.0 Main Topic
New Series 1.0 Main Topic, Part II

The linked threads don't answer my question, though.

Question: What's a good way to title a series with a common word as the name and many authors in the series?

Example: Portals, anthology series by Science Fiction Romance Brigade

Would "Portals (SFR Brigade)" be good enough as a series title?

Also, is parentheses, a comma, square brackets, those squiggly brackets, or a dash generally better to separate the series name from its distinguishing info?

>2 aspirit: Portals (SFR Brigade) looks like a good name to me. I generally use braces, { }, but you can use anything except square brackets as they will interfere with touchstones.

>2 aspirit:
>3 amanda4242:
I, like Amanda, also use braces - I've been working on Great Lives {Duckworth}.

It would, perhaps, be nice to have a guideline on this, and related questions. If we want to use parentheses instead, that's fine with me. I do think commas or dashes are poor choices, as they can make the distinguishing information look like a subtitle.

I'd say the distinguishing information should probably be author (or authorial group, as I assume SFR Brigade is) or publisher, or general editor, in that order of preference.

My question is: should you add a distinguisher if there's a calculated author? I think the author shows up in searches.

Another question:

Was there ever a consensus on what to do with a series that is almost entirely new publications, but includes one or two works that are republished? (This appears to be the case with the Great Lives series). I think the main example this has been mentioned in relation to is Oxford's Very Short Introductions series.

edited to get the Oxford Series name correct.

>5 gabriel: Republished within the same series or books from outside the series republished into the series? These are rather important distinctions.

>6 gilroy:

The latter, first published outside the series. Sorry I wasn't clearer.

I see that the A Very Short Introduction series has been moved to a Publisher Series; but Wikipedia says VSI has dozens of republished works, while Great Lives has just one I'm reasonably confident about.

One more question: what to do with series where the titles are inconsistent?

Rupert Annuals has about six different ways of formatting the title, various combinations of original title, year of publication and number in the series. Most titles appear to be forced by existing canonical titles to the particular variations.

The original titles appear to be recorded on Wikipedia.

I think a rigorous interpretation of the policy would be to just remove existing canonical titles, and only use them when the algorithm produces something clearly wrong. But I'd bet that would result in even more inconsistency, so I'm wondering if this is a case where canonical title could/should be used more broadly to introduce consistency to the title formats for the series.

edit: the authorship of the works in the series is also a bit of an inconsistent mess, including some "confirmed" corporate authorships, but I'm not sure I'd want to wade into that particular problem.

5> If you leave it in series, anyone with the original edition is well within their rights to remove that work from the series.

>5 gabriel: Based on that answer, you have a publisher's series. Even just one book pulled in from another source means it is not a 100% unique series.

>9 MarthaJeanne:
>10 gilroy:

I'm happy with that if that's indeed the consensus, I'm just looking for guidance. But I found the discussion I half-remembered: https://www.librarything.com/topic/293460

I especially note Crypto-Willobie's comment, which suggests that one or two non-original works can stay in a true series. Maybe that's contrary to consensus, or was there never a consensus on this?

>11 gabriel: There was never consensus.

>12 gilroy:

Okay, good to know. Maybe we can develop one? (I think this thread is as good as any).

After thinking about it, I still don't have a strong opinion: on the one hand, these kinds of series that are publisher-driven strike me as being far afield from the core purpose of Series, which is to highlight common-world or common-conception works. And any kind of publication outside of the series (either before or after publication in the series) would seem to erode the uniqueness of the series - there will be copies which don't belong to the series.

On the other hand, if we are going to have series like Ladybird Books, which has a wide variety of authors, topics, and even conceptions - see Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups, then it seems anomalous to exclude more-focused series (such as Great Lives {Duckworth}) merely because the publisher plucked a couple titles from its backlist as well as commissioning a slew of new works.

Of course, if we need a clearly-defined dividing line between publication series and true series, we shouldn't adopt the more liberal approach.

I think most of us here are not happy with 'series' that are really just a publisher's list.

>14 MarthaJeanne: Seconded. If I see that I have a book included in a true series that should be a publisher series, my practice is to switch the series to a publisher series; failing that, I would remove the work from the series altogether (which doesn't seem like an optimal solution to me).

>14 MarthaJeanne: But the question is what is the dividing line?

Personally, I consider VSIs a series, but I wouldn't fight edit wars over it. Out of over 500 titles, a dozen are republished from a similarly envisioned, but smaller scope and by now defunct series. Instead of commissioning the new ones on those topics, Oxford decided to incorporate several existing ones.

I do hope, however, we will not enforce a 'no exceptions' rule and move all non-fiction series to publisher series if they feature a single previously published work. I'm primarily thinking about academic ones, which usually focus on a particular topic. E.g. Advances in Consciousness Research should remain a series even if includes one or two previously published works.

>16 SandraArdnas:
See, and I would treat many if not most academic series as publisher series even if they contain no previously published works.

My basis for deciding whether nonfiction titles are a series rather than a publisher series is whether the titles were written specifically for the series and have certain shared traits: the same format, audience, etc. Examples might be the "For Dummies" books, Norton Critical editions, or Oxford Handbooks.
My experience (not directly in academic publishing, but adjacent to it) suggests that a few topical academic series might be produced this way -- but most aren't. Including, in many cases, ones with titles like "new studies in..." or "advances in..." It's more of a process of matching up book manuscripts with suitable series. (Note that I'm in social sciences/humanities; other disciplines may differ, and textbook publishing is another world altogether.)

Because academic titles often have smaller print runs and are less likely to be reissued or translated than titles intended for a popular audience, I don't see the criterion "have any titles been published outside the series" as sufficient to define a publisher series. I'd tend to formulate it more theoretically: would titles still be recognizable as part of the series even if they were to be published without the series "branding"?

I don't think it's always clear-cut, however. The argument that a publisher might decide to pick up a few previously published titles which fit the format and style of an otherwise commissioned series makes sense to me.

I will reiterate that it would be really helpful to have a way to view and track publisher series more easily. I understand the issue with not wanting large amounts of edition-specific (and thus often irrelevant) information to be prominently displayed everywhere, but it seems like there must be ways to make the information more available to those who do want to access it occasionally. There are some indisputably publisher series that I find interesting and valuable as a source of additional reading -- but unlike regular series, there's no page in my library where I can browse publisher series. A "favorite" function (similar to what exists for authors and lists) for series and publisher series might be one option.

It's also an issue for database editing: at present publisher series aren't displayed on the "related series" list of series pages (and vice versa), which makes it difficult to quickly identify duplication across series types.

>16 SandraArdnas:

I don't think we should regard "Publisher Series" as, ipso facto, an inferior type of series. All the information is still there - it's just a little harder to reach. It's a bit of a pity that they aren't as visible as true Series, but hopefully we can lobby for some improvement in that regard with LT 2.0

There are a number of anomalies with the Series/Publisher Series divide as it stands. One I'd point out is poetry series. Where the publisher makes selections, they are separate works, and (usually) unique to that series. So they're true Series under current guidelines. But all the content is usually previously published, and often broadly published elsewhere. There's no commissioning, no originality to the content, and no bar on republishing in a different series. Faber Poet-to-Poet would be a true Series except it recycles previous selections made for the same publisher in different series - but there isn't really any significant difference between that series and other poetry series which do meet the true series criterion.

You also have publishers who appear to retroactively include books in a series: the Oxford Illustrated Histories includes a number of titles that were originally published simply as "Oxford History of X". Maybe they were always part of the same series, despite the difference in title style, but I have my doubts.

Then there are critical editions of works. If the academic work is significant enough (or a helper decides they are), they are bespoke academic series, and thus a true series. If the critical apparatus and comment isn't significant enough for a couple books in the series, it's a mere publisher series.

The most attractive division between series and publisher series for me would be: would the works, no matter how published, be a series? This restricts series to common-world or common-conception series. This would mean the selected poetry series and most academic series would become publisher series - which makes sense to me - the unique thing about such series isn't the content, it's the publisher.

edited to finish an incomplete sentence.

>17 spiphany: My basis for deciding whether nonfiction titles are a series rather than a publisher series is whether the titles were written specifically for the series and have certain shared traits

Of course, that is the general principle agreed upon on LT. I was pointing out that occasionally such series include a previously published book that fits into its scope, but the vast majority are still series specific

>18 gabriel: Until publisher series is as accessible as series it's difficult to adopt the attitude it's not inferior. It's really not a value judgement, but rather a practical concern.

Why would you lump academic series into publisher series? They are tied by content/common concept. Most of them don't have any works not commissioned for the series specifically and I really dislike the idea of moving even those that include a reprint of one or two books.

I'd like to point out the 'published specifically for series' as a criterion has very practical foundations. If a book has not been published by others, it is not possible for members to appear to have series they do not have. Conversely, there's really no harm in assigning a series to your example of poetry collections, provided they are distinct works because again only members who have that edition will see the series info. This isn't the case with genuine publisher series.

Edit: also wanted to add that even if publisher series info becomes more easily accessible in the future, the fact remains it includes entire publishing history of entire imprints and is really a sea into which we shouldn't drown something better fitting a regular series

>20 SandraArdnas: "Most (academic series) don't have any works not commissioned for the series specifically."

This is the point that I was disagreeing with in my previous post (>17 spiphany:). My experience is that the titles in most academic series are NOT, in fact, commissioned specifically for the series: an author writes a manuscript and then tries to find a publisher and series that it fits in. The only thing uniting the titles in such a series is the subject matter.

The fact that many of these books have not been published elsewhere has more to do with the smaller audience of specialized academic titles than any essential series-specific qualities of the content.

At least this is the case in disciplines which heavily emphasize publishing monographs (i.e., many humanities and social science fields). Publication in STEM fields tends to be more based around journal articles so commissioning books for a series may be more common.

And yes, a large portion of the items currently listed as publisher series are what I would consider imprints rather than series of any type. (Though here, too, the distinction is sometimes fuzzy.)

>20 SandraArdnas:
>17 spiphany:

I didn't see spiphany's post at 17 before my earlier post, but I agree with most of what she wrote.

If there's no harm in having unique poetry collections in a true series because there won't be editions that are outside the series, I think the converse is also true: series that include (even a few) previously-published or subsequently-republished (outside the series) works do have an element of harm, resulting in some users having LT show they have part of a true series they actually don't have.

I do agree with the imprints versus series problem, although there are some problems. Penguin, for instance, undoubtedly published a number of notable publisher series: Pelican Books, King Penguin, Penguin Classics, and so forth. The main series seems a lot more like an imprint, but it has a lot of the same characteristics as the other Penguin series. I'd also note that some true "series" are also a lot like imprints: the For Dummies series, the Ladybird Books I referenced above, Little Golden Books, etc.

I think part of the reason that publisher series aren't more visible is because they are going to be a complete mess for most users, in part because of those overlapping "imprints", but in part just because there's plenty of overlap between normal publisher series. Without being able to assign your own works to a specific publisher series, there's no way to avoid the problem.

Does anyone have thoughts on combining closely related Publisher Series? The Early English Text Society publishes three "series": an "original" series, a "supplemental series" and an "extra" series. We have a publisher series for each, and one for the whole shebang. As far as I can tell, there isn't any difference in scope, subject or editorial approach. The extra and supplemental series, judging by their website, are mainly for replacing older, inadequate versions from the original series.

Given the close inter-relationship of the series, my inclination would be to combine all of them into one, separating the original, supplemental and extra series into different groups. Or should we eliminate the general series? Or leave as-is?