Series Author

I'm not sure if this is the place to ask this question or not - so sorry if it's not - but I added the rest of the books to this series. It is a mixture of 2 different authors.:

https://www.librarything.com/nseries/130700/Culpepper-Cowboys

Because the calculated series author is Kirsten Osbourne the series only shows up on her author page. Merry Farmer does not have Culpepper Cowboys as an entry under her series list on her author page.

Someone had made a separate series for the books by Merry Farmer called Culpepper Cowboys. I deleted it before I realized she would not be recognized as an author for the other Culpepper Cowboy series.

What am I missing? Sorry.

Nothing - that's how the new system works basically. That's why you will see these mini-subseries - so the series show up on the author pages. :(

I had been complaining because of series such as https://www.librarything.com/nseries/311249/Cole-and-Hitch - where the author who started it has no chance for the series to be shown on his page - that series is essentially a ghost because it cannot be linked on anyone's page. All complaints had fallen on deaf ears.

That single change had made the whole series feature a lot less useful.

>3 AnnieMod: Thanks for the info, that really is too bad. It seems like any authors that contribute to a series should be recognized.

Leave this open as a bug - maybe it will be acknowledged and fixed this time around :)

Hi, I'm acknowledging this! I don't like that members feel they have to work around the system, creating unnecessary sub-series to get the credit they want to see on author's pages, personally. I'll see what the developers think about this. Maybe timspalding has a bigger reason why we're doing it the way we are, or I'm missing something on the other end of the spectrum.

>6 kristilabrie: Numbers I suspect - the old way (you have a book in so we link the series) was on the side so 1 or 100 did not matter. Now being on top of the books list, it is a bit different.
But - see the two examples above. And with Parker there is also https://www.librarything.com/nseries/272/Philip-Marlowe

With the old system you could see what series the author had books in. With the new? The only way is to open every single book of theirs. That’s not an improvement any way you look at it.

Okay, this isn't a bug, but a decision to avoid clogging up authors with series that aren't really "theirs." Even so I have changed the logic.

Previously an author was only credited if they were responsible for 50% of the books in a series, and 50% of the copies. I have change it to:

1. Must be on 2 books in the series.
2. Must represent at least 10% of the books
3. Must represent at least 10% of the copies

That's added a lot of series to a lot of authors. People are going to complain because some rather marginal stuff will get shown on authors' pages. If someone wants to suggest a rule that will do everything right, let me know.

Has this created another problem, I am continually discovering series not listed on authorname page, but when I go to add to item the series does exist.

Current fix-around seems to be go into the series to add new save then it appears.

My major concern is I can't identify these until I stumble across it.

example
https://www.librarything.com/author/owensjc
https://www.librarything.com/work/26202580

so maybe not fixed

looks like this is mainly happening where there is only 1 item in the series listed

I have started changing manually but even those added yesterday have dropped off listing on authorpage

just proved that even though i have manually "fixed" the series to link to the authorpage, it resets itself

help!!

>9 gsc55: Um, that looks like it is following Tim's new rules. There's only one book in the series, not two, so it won't get an author until it has two works in the series.

>13 Taliesien: It's not aesthetics, it's practicality and common sense. I for one definitely do not want 500 authors credited for a series, each for a short story or an article.

>14 SandraArdnas: If the articles and short stories are added to the series, then why snub their authors? And why would the series Not be added to the author’s page?

And there are ways to shorten the list visually (as is done for series on author pages) without losing the data functionally.

thanks guys, clearly I misread the new parameters.

I think the concern is valid. I think there's a significant difference between the relationship that obtains between Rowling and Harry Potter, and between Gaiman and 111 series that have a story of his in them. But I'm not going to fight this. When we redo the work page, we'll work on a way to sort and demote series whose connection to the author is tenuous. For now, however, no minimum books or percent is in effect.

The results are various, but, for example, Azimov has gone from 100 to 267 series, and Dostoevsky has gone from 18 series to 196.

>15 AnnieMod: Why would it be a snub? Why do we need every single contributor as series author? Where do you draw a line? Do illustrators count and when? Just when they are main authors or if a single book in a series features five of their illustrations? Translators for translated series? At some point, every single piece of data in every spot in the system becomes noise. The question is when it becomes noise rather than useful data.

>18 SandraArdnas: Because then when the author writes a second story in the same series, you can find the series under series by the same author. That’s what I want - how it is visualized is a different thing.

>19 AnnieMod: Yes, you can wade through a sea of series on author page and the fact that s/he added another story to one of them will jump right at you. Sorry for being snarky, but my series page is already pretty much useless to me because half of those listed I do not have and do not know. What I have is anthologies containing a single story from some series universe. I really do not want series on author pages to become a sea of useless information too.

>20 SandraArdnas: What is useless for you is useful for some other users.

And the number of series with 500 authors is minimal - for most this change makes everyone’s life easier. Designing for the extremes by having the normal cases become useless is a bad way to design. We need a happy medium but it is not “hide most of our data” which was the case before this last change.

>21 AnnieMod: But it has made a page that should contain MY series useless to me. That is not something you can dismiss as 'it's useful to someone else'. Why should I see countless series I do not have as part of MY library because some people find it more convenient to add an entire anthology to the series, rather than just the short story that actually belongs there? Most of my anthologies belong to at lest half a dozen series, some more.

The point is no cut-off whatsoever for series authors is bound to end up with a morass of similarly useless info on author pages and I for one am opposed to it. Just because someone might find something useful is not a valid design decision basis, so hopefully the powers that be will base theirs on something better than '3 people wish it so we must do it'

>22 SandraArdnas: No. But not having it makes my series page useless for me. You cannot dismiss that either. People use the various types of series pages differently. As I said - we need a happy medium but losing data is not it.

And the issue are not stories. Find a way to remove them, I am not going to grumble. The old model hid novels in multi author series.

>23 AnnieMod: Not having anthologies be a part of a dozen series makes your series page useless? The happy medium would be to enter the short stories themselves if you want to see them on series page, not inflict a series overflooding to anyone with anthologies. It would also be more informative because you'd actually see what story you're looking for, as opposed to the anthology, whose title or editor give you zero information about the story in question. My series page has a lot of series in and of itself, those I actually have. With hundreds of series I've never heard of thrown into the mix, I get a headache just looking at it and have abandoned any attempts to use it.

A similar no-limit approach to series on author pages will also result in complete noise in some of them. If you get overwhelmed with series info and have trouble finding core ones of an author in the sea of contributor ones, that is quite simply poor data presentation and no amount of 'I find it useful' would make it any better for the general user

>24 SandraArdnas: Read again the second paragraph of my answer.

>24 SandraArdnas: But yes. I like having the series there even when there is only one story that applies. I can live without them but I prefer them there. What the old model here was hiding were series and authors when a book Is part of the main group of a series (novels usually in my case). Now that groups can have works grouped, maybe that can be used to accommodate both usages.

Again - your preferences are different than mine. Dismissing mine while asking me to agree with yours is a bit weird.

>26 AnnieMod: There's nothing weird about insisting that a single book is not a part of a dozen series. It isn't. But I've abandoned the idea of rectifying that part and as I said, I'm resigned to not using my series page at all. It is an illustration of noise created by no limits approach. I don't want to resign myself to dreading series info on author pages too. I'm not sure why you think how you or several people would prefer data to be presented must be accommodated. There's such a thing as general usability, which hopefully takes precedence. Sometimes, you have to be the one to resign yourself to not having something your way.

>27 SandraArdnas: Right. Your opinion and preferences are more important than mine and other people’s on this thread because reasons. Noted.

I believe there is merit in having multiple authors listed for a series, shared universe series and comics spring to mind as two cases where it would be beneficial, but I don't think how it currently works is the best way. As an example, the Grendel series page has a huge block of authors at the top, with a number of names repeated and at least one name that's a typo and has no works on the author page. Is there perhaps a way to divide things between primary or main authors and contributing author so that all contributors to a series are credited, but not all have equal prominence?

For anthologies containing stories from many series, I am not in favor of including them in series because, in addition to listing authors who have never written a single word for a series, they bring in entirely unrelated CK to series pages. A person who wants to easily know if an anthology contains a piece of a series could tag for it, but a person who wants to know what characters, places, awards, etc. belong to a series cannot filter out the unrelated information that is brought in by adding anthologies.

I don't know if this would be feasible from a programming standpoint, but would it be an acceptable solution to do something like including all authors who are listed as a "primary author" of works in a series but not those who are listed as a "secondary author"?

This would mean that all authors who contribute to a multi-author series would count, as well as authors who co-authored titles, while presumably authors who only wrote one story in an anthology would be omitted. (I'm not in favor of including anthologies in series listings if only one story in it is part of the series, but I realize there are enough people who think otherwise that trying to keep these titles out of series listings isn't particularly practical.)

There are a few cases this wouldn't produce the desired results -- i.e., shared-world anthologies where the entire anthology belongs to the series wouldn't have contributing authors counted, but I suspect volumes of this type make up only a very small percentage of all series pages.

>30 spiphany: Either that or using the groups in the series - count only the main group but not the custom ones and the collections when looking for the authors. Then it comes down to how groups are organized and groups can be tweaked where needed.

>30 spiphany: I think this is a good idea.

I feel like the basis of this conflict is people are using different definitions of "series author" - to me, an author of a series is someone who had a significant creative role in a series. So, an author who wrote two volumes in a multi-author shared world series ought to be an author of that series.

An author whose book was posthumously included in a series of annotated classics, or an author whose essay was selected by an editor to be in an anthology, don't seem to me like they are "authors" of the "series", because they didn't have any real role in the creation of the series. They are authors *in* the series, but not authors *of* the series. But there are also people on this thread who want every author *in* the series to be listed.

(This feels to me sort of like the series/publisher series split? If you created something for the purpose of it being a series, you're the first type of series author. If your thing was later included in a series some other people created, you're the second type of series author.)

>29 amanda4242: A lot of comic series probably should have a ton of authors listed, because comics series often do have a ludicrous number of people directly contributing to them.

But the bit where it's listing the same author more than once (and there are blank authors) in Grendel seems like a definite bug. Is it listing the same author twice if they have different roles in different volumes? I can't think of why you'd ever want that to happen.

>29 amanda4242: Don't blame me for the mess. I cleaned up the Grendel series when I logged our comic collection earlier this year. The Comico entries are from other's logged books - all ours should be Matt Wagner. Unfortunately, in most cases, there are only 2 works and the earliest work wins out when combining.

I guess the only thing would be to clean up the author list for all listed works (shudder)...

>28 AnnieMod: No, your preferences are a must and you refuse to consider anything else despite pretending otherwise. In reality, you don't consider your preferences not met an option. Mine have already been trudged upon thoroughly and I'm living with it

>32 melannen: For publisher series, I usually tick the setting "don't calculate series author" for precisely this reason -- generally the authors of the individual works aren't of particularly great relevance for publisher series. I don't think publisher series are displayed on author pages anyway, however (they aren't displayed at the top of work pages).

The "don't calculate author" setting is also a possiblity for regular series. I could see this being a way to deal with, e.g., things like Norton Critical Editions.

>35 SandraArdnas: And where did I say that? Look at my posts - I am talking about compromises everywhere. You are insisting that only you are right.

>33 melannen: It looks like it's listing combined names twice, like Edvin Biukovic and Edvin Biuković are both listed even though the two names are combined.

And yeah, long running comics series are probably going to have an insane number of authors who should be given major credit, but I still think it would be good to have a way to differentiate authors who have written dozens of works in a series and those who have written one or two.

>34 Maddz: Absolutely not blaming you for this! And I applaud your work on the series. I put in a lot of work on Hellblazer, and am slightly terrified by its author list; Neil Gaiman wrote exactly one issue, but his contribution is given as much weight as Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis, who wrote dozens of issues each? Doesn't seem quite right.

>37 AnnieMod: What compromise? In both cases, you're not willing to budge, yet we're pretending otherwise? No matter. I'm as tired of this topic as of my series page. If it turns out the same morass on series and author pages, I'll have yet another unusable LT 'feature'

thanks tim

>40 SandraArdnas: Please read my comments before continuing to explain what I am thinking. I’ve even offered a solution by using the groups in the series - which will solve your anthologies issues while keeping the novels that were missing in the Earlier version connected properly. Or missing the author when an author has a story which is part of the main sequence.

You also seem to read “story” as “anthology” every time when someone mentions stories. You know that they can be cataloged separately, right?

And which “both cases”? I don’t like series on that anthologies level unless the whole anthology is in the series but other people do. So I find a way to live with that. Leaving authors out of series (and series out of their authors’ pages) cannot be a solution of a different problem.

When too much information is on the page, most of us can keyword search for what we want.

When too little information is on the page, what solution is there? To go digging for an unknown amout of time with hope of finding the desired series?

Data that needs to be cleaned up is also easier to take care of when visible than when buried, so I don't understand messy data from conflicting CK entries as a reason to hide almost all authors on series pages. Maybe I'm missing the point of that mention.

Blech.
https://www.librarything.com/nseries/3448/Images-of-America

There are now 1,786 series with more than 50 authors. Before there were none.

>44 timspalding: Show the First 3-5 and then have a “See more”. The same way series work on author pages (and works on author pages even though the cutover there is higher).

>44 timspalding: >45 AnnieMod: Only show authors who are the main author of a significant portion of the works, at least 50%. There's really no point showing a list like that, even hidden under a (see more) link. If you want to see all the zillions of authors who have contributed to the series, just scroll down to the list of works - where each author is listed next to the work they contributed.

And yes, I'd definitely untick "Allow series author to be calculated" for that one, and most publisher series.

It's called "Series author", which to me means author of the series, not "Authors who have contributed anything to the series".

>46 r.orrison: There are two parts to that. The algorithm used to show the authors on this page is the same used to show the series on the authors’ pages. Take this series: https://www.librarything.com/nseries/311249/Cole-and-Hitch

Implementing your proposal will remove Parker from the list of authors on the author page and the series from Parker’s page. And yet - it is his series, even if the continuation now has more books. Not having a link from his author page to the series is just weird and loss of data.

I am fine with not calculating in extreme cases though - see: https://www.librarything.com/nseries/272/Philip-Marlowe - the series show up on the pages of the authors with one title without cluttering this page. I’d rather have Chandler as the author but if the choice is between not having him on the Series page and not having the series on the other authors’ pages, I prefer this. Of course, if the two selections are split and showing the series on an author page is not ties to what is visualized on the series page, that may solve everyone’s concerns even more (except that there is also the user series page which now uses the same logic and a decision needs to be made for it as well).

Before that last change, this series was not showing on Parker’s page.

Just went to look at the Doctor Who series page. Big oof.

>48 Stevil2001: A candidate for removing the tick to allow series author to be calculated.

ETA:
Ideally, there should be an option to manually set a series author, especially for the case of corporate authors or when a series has been extended by multiple other authors.

>48 Stevil2001: Oof. knerd.knitter has at least limited the Series Author section so it doesn't take up a full page+ of space. Hope that helps.

ETA: it's getting pushed; should be up in a few minutes.

Thanks, that does help!

>45 AnnieMod: >50 kristilabrie: The click-to-show-all is really quite an effective solution to this. Well done.