Beginner help need on series

Hi, I'm new to series and combining.

There's a well-known single-publisher series (around for decades, distinctively branded) (192 titles)
https://www.librarything.com/nseries/2744/World-of-Art

Another series seems to overlap it (78 titles)
https://www.librarything.com/nseries/258720/Thames-and-Hudson-World-of-Art

I also have a tag for the same series (44 titles)
https://www.librarything.com/catalog/Andy_Dingley&tag=black+Thames+Hudson+Wo...

I think that all three of these should be combined. As it is there's overlap, but still plenty that aren't in the canon series, and some more recent titles too that are in none of them.

What's the best thing to do next? I'm happy to do the legwork here.

Tags can't be combined with Series. Only with other tags. So while the tag can be on the books, and show up in the series right side panel, it isn't combined into the series itself.

As for the two series...
It appears the two are being kept separate because of a distinct of publication order versus something else. (I'm not 100% privy to what, since I don't have these books, but the basic set up is different.) You might want to reach out to the series creators: AnnaClaire and Nicole_VanK to see if they are actually the same series, just duplicated. Also possible, under the Edit Series button, under Relationship/Combine, you can select that one series is a reordering of the other.

I wasn't looking to combine the tag, more to remove the need for having it, by updating the series to the full set of titles involved in it.

Even if all the books in the series aren't listed, you can at least make sure that the ones you own are.

>2 gilroy: The second series is sorted alphabetically, if you assume that Los Angeles is being sorted on Angeles.

Checking more carefully, I think Thames & Hudson needs to be updated and completed, the other either ignored or even deleted. It has too many books that aren't in this series, they just have "world of art" somewhere in the title.

>4 MarthaJeanne: I put a canonical title in yesterday, and that book is now with the Ls.

Just added a disambiguation notice to explain that.

Ouch. Sort order is painful on long series.

There seems to be a bug in that sorting when labels are used is done on the concatenation of the two fields, rather than their coalescence. This means that sorting can't be used on labels to sort out the few exceptional cases, unless _every_ entry is given a label.

(Also auto-sorting breaks any manual sorting and is then hard to revert. If anyone fancies experimenting with this, do it on a short series!)

>7 Andy_Dingley:
> There seems to be a bug in that sorting when labels are used is done on the concatenation of the two fields, rather than their coalescence.

That sentence is a little chewy, but if you're meaning what I think:
a series can be toggled between "Grouped" and "Ungrouped" on the main page (buttons located below where the cover images display). So if you wish to view it purely by the Order Label, you can hit "Ungrouped" to do that. But if that misunderstands your point could you explain a bit more?

Regarding sorting by manual order: if a series has only a few items with Order Labels, and the rest blank, it will sort those with labels into order and any blanks get lumped together, but that's correct for it to do, no?

To your last point: I think we would benefit from a revert/undo option in the edit history (similar to wiki editing) to easily get a series back into a previous state, as it can feel a little perilous without that.

I think it's sorting on a compound key, rather than coalescing them (best) or even just concatenating. Easy fix in the code. The result is that when labels are used, _everything_ has to have a label, otherwise all those that don't are sorted after those that do. It would be better (and usual practice) that if there's no specific label, then title is used instead as a default.