Lumping Annual Events together?

(Originally posted on Combiners!)

Hi all.

I'm working on that fabulous new feature, "where you got your books", in my catalogue. I stumbled across an issue that relates to the group however.

The National Book Festival, held every year on the National Mall in DC, has had every year lumped under one heading "National Book Festival - 2010," which would be fine if it were all the festivals of that year. It's not. It also contains 2007, 2008, and 2009 under the heading.

Normally, I wouldn't care, but this goes back to that feature. If we keep it with the existing title, it makes it look like books bought back in 2007 were from the 2010 festival.

I didn't want to edit the title until I broached the subject here.

Opinions?

edited to correct misspelling

A variant of your problem, which should also be worked out, is whether they should be lumped. They aren't always, but I think they should be: the Brooklyn Book Festival is the Brooklyn Book Festival, no matter if you went in 2008, 2009 or 2010.

Please make different entries for each version. As someone who enters a lot of events, I assure you this is best practice. A festival will have different panels, workshops, guests, and vendors each year, making each event unique. Additionally, having them collected under one page will result in a rather unwieldy page: for example, San Diego Comic Con has over a hundred events each year, can you imagine having one page for all of them?

Which reminds me: I wish the years went back further than 2005; I have books bought in 2001 I'd love to attribute to their proper event. I wonder how far is too far?

I'm on the fence about this issue. The National Book Festival does not have each individual event listed. It does have a few comments which pertain to the festival as a whole. It has very few events listed. The title and content of one listing is more easily changed with each year's differences. By the way, I do know how to use the "clone" feature on Local.

To record at which festival year one obtains a book, simply use the LT feature called "acquisition date" on the "edit page". That year should be clear enough.

There really needs to be a better way to list recurring events/fairs/festivals, in a way that doesn't require a completely separate listing for every year but still keeps things accurate. I've been missing that pretty much since Local started: if I could say "This book sale happens every year on the first Saturday in October" or whatever , it would increase Local's functionality so much.

>5 melannen:
Like some sort of a "nested events" concept: if something like a festival is so designated (does there need to be a checkbox for "recurring"?), you can add sub-events with the specific particulars of each year's festival.

Yes! Something like that, anyway. For a lot of the venues I use, you wouldn't even need much in the way of specific particulars - for a recurring community book sale, for example, pretty much the only thing that would need changed for individual events is the date. But of course for things like the National Book Festival, you'd want to be able to put in that year's schedules, sub-events, etc.

Though even then, I think I would be fine with a version where you had just a National Book Festival entry in Local, and the most recent/upcoming details would always show on the main page, and you could only see previous years' details in some kind of archive/sub-page. (As happens with the actual homepages of those kinds of events.)

Then what would be nice would be the abilty to mark the sub events for the "Where you got the book" feature.

Would you post your suggestion to the RSI (Recommended Site Improvements) group, gilroy? That would be a "quick fix" for anyone who could code that option in, I think.

I'll try to take the best of this discussion thread and place it as a single request, though I won't claim full credit for it. It was a collaborative effort.

If we can collect all the entries but still maintain their unique information--which includes not only events, guests, and vendors, but also the date and location (which can and does significantly change for some events)--then I am okay with it. The only reason we create separate entries for separate years is that the current system has no way to save and view old data.

Each edition of an event is like an edition of a book, with its own unique attributes that are worth recording--and mind you, here on LT we don't combine different editions of a book because of those differences.

> 11

The only reason we create separate entries for separate years is that the current system has no way to save and view old data.

For this reason alone, it might be worthwhile to start creating a yearly National Book Festival entry. I had no idea that old information was eventually deleted.

Old events aren't deleted; they are archived once the date passes, though not organized by year (which is a problem for regular venues that have a lot of events). But if/when you enter new dates, addresses, or info text, it overwrites the old information. I think it's incredibly valuable to know when say, Book Expo America was in New York versus Los Angeles, and it should be preserved and searchable.

11 My issue with separate entries for separate years is that if you enter them as a fair/festival under "venues", then in any area that is near any number of them, your own local listings & maps get flooded with duplicate entries for every year the festival happens.

If my recommendations were constantly getting flooded with five different editions of the same book, you can bet I'd be complaining about that too!

There might be other ways to fix this - like taking the "fair/festival" option out of "venues" entirely and putting them into "events", with better archiving for past events at a venue, and have people set up the location of the fair/festival (like the National Mall) as an "other" venue. Of course, then the venue maps would get flooded with 'other' things like churches, fairgrounds, and convention centers that have no obvious connection to books... and it still wouldn't work well for "from where".

> then in any area that is near any number of them, your own local listings & maps get flooded with duplicate entries for every year the festival happens.

Not if the fair/festival has been marked as "defunct." Once it's been marked, it no longer appears in your local listings or on maps unless you specifically search for it.

What would be nice is if the system automatically marked fairs/festivals as defunct once the dates passed.