ISFDB:Help desk

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This page is for questions about how to do something, either in the ISFDB or the ISFDB Wiki. This includes both questions about how to do a specific task, and also more general questions about what should be done about particular situations where the information is clearly wrong and the solution is not obvious. For other specific requests, see appropriate places listed at ISFDB:Community Portal.

For older, answered queries, see this page's archives.

Use this link to add a new section at the bottom without having to edit the whole page; don't forget to fill in "Heading/section"

Contents

Old, but never answered queries

(None currently)

New project "ISFDB:Missing Titles from The History of Science Fiction by Adam Roberts (2005)"

Riding on the success of the previous project of missing titles from Barron, I have created a new one: ISFDB:Missing Titles from The History of Science Fiction by Adam Roberts (2005). Mhhutchins, this time I checked & fixed the raw data (it had some typos as well as in Barron case), please see the comments on the project page. Do you want to add them, or do you prefer me to do it? Regards, Qshadow 20:05, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Go ahead and add the titles using the omnibus method that I told you about. We can do some fine tuning later. Mhhutchins 20:12, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Same printing, different cover

I have come across this verified pub which, according to Locus1, has been printed with two covers, one by Darrell K. Sweet, the other by Roger Loveless. The verified pub in the ISFDB is the one with the Loveless cover, but I own the book with the Sweet cover. So how do we record same printings but with different covers in the ISFDB?

  1. Create different pub records?
  2. Only one pub record, just mention the difference in the pub notes?
  3. Something else entirely?

Also consider this pub where the two covers are identical, except for the color. Does this change the answer? Thanks, Patrick -- Herzbube Talk 14:14, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't know that there's an official policy. I think that if you have a different cover artist, you should record a different pub record: some of the basic information about the publication is different (the Cover Artist field and the cover art image). If the covers are the same but different colors, I would just make a note in the existing pub and (optionally) upload the alternate-color cover and provide a link to that in the notes. An example of recording color differences in notes: Different Seasons. These show an example of recording two instances of the publication where the artwork differs (images swapped): The Waste Lands train on back, The Waste Lands train on front. --MartyD 00:27, 3 November 2012 (UTC)
If it has an entirely different cover (even if it has the same art work; e.g., different text or art work framing, etc.), I tend to lean towards another entry as often this is a separate but mislabeled or unlabeled printing. It can make verifications easier to sort out that way as well as you mention. Uzume 11:19, 3 November 2012 (UTC)
Thank you both, that's pretty much what I thought myself. Patrick -- Herzbube Talk 15:22, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

Request: Please make search better by disregarding spaces

When I enter a search and my string has extra space in the end or in the beginning, the search always returns: NOT Found. Not every newcomer to our website knows that these harmless spaces cause such difference, and even for me it adds a lot of headache because I usually copy paste the title/author from another document/website and it sometimes brings the extra space with it.

Could you please make the search disregard those extra spaces like we are used to with other search engines? Qshadow 16:00, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

While have the leading and trailing spaces be part of the search does have some downsides, its pluses far outweigh that in my opinion. It makes it much easier to find something based on a partial search term. For example, "Anthony" vs. " Anthony". My preference would be that when a search terms returns no results (usually the case when you query on a full name or title with a trailing space), instead of just showing nothing found, it allows you to edit the search term and resubmit. -- JLaTondre (talk) 17:12, 3 November 2012 (UTC)
Yes, that's why the search logic currently works the way it does, but it can admittedly confuse new users and inconvenience experienced ones. One possible compromise would be to change the search logic to strip leading and trailing spaces by default and then add a check-box that would override this behavior -- just like we have an override check-box during import/export operations. Ahasuerus 17:42, 3 November 2012 (UTC)
Another option it to use the standard (google?) way like JLaTondre showed above, putting "" forces exact search including space: " Anthony". Check box is also a good solution but the default behaviour should be what users are used to from google (and other search engines)- that spaces doesn't matter unless "" or checkbox is used. Qshadow 19:28, 3 November 2012 (UTC)
Why not just asking the ISFDB user to enter what they're searching for? The ISFDB search (of a database) doesn't apply the same logic as a Google search (for websites). It's not going to give you near matches. And I would hope that the average ISFDB user is slightly more intelligent regarding databases than the average Google user. (I didn't say they were, just that I hope.) Mhhutchins 21:48, 3 November 2012 (UTC)
But they ARE entering the search exactly as it is, they have exactly copy pasted it from another website. The only addition is the trailing space, And people are used to ignore this extra spaces, this is actually not only search engine convention. Any cmd line command in Windows or Linux or any other OS ignores spaces. Even the MySQL scripts ignore spaces when you write them. Of course we can try to educate the millions of newcomers that our website is a special case, and those who fail to learn will just leave after few empty results. But frankly I do not see a reason for this, if Ahasuerus can make us some checkbox in our preferences that says: "Do Not ignore extra space when searching" all of the veteran members who prefer it will set it, or even will have it set by default. since if a person has an account here he is probably not a newbie and knows how to search our db. In this case everyone will be happy. Qshadow 23:57, 3 November 2012 (UTC)
Are you certain that you're not projecting your own quirks of search method onto the "average" user? If you're copying and pasting from another website into the database, why aren't you copying the text as given without any leading or trailing spaces? Mhhutchins 03:24, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
Windows has a "wonderful" habit of adding leading/trailing spaces when you copy text :-( Ahasuerus 06:42, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
Then either I've never noticed it, or it didn't make any difference, because I've been copying and pasting for 20 years. And I've never had the need to copy and paste into an ISFDB search. If I've not done that in five years of working on the database almost every day, I can't imagine the average database user doing anything differently. Or am I just projecting my own experiences onto other users? Mhhutchins 07:25, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
Oh yes, this issue has confused a number of ISFDB users over the years. Shortly after ISFDB 2 went live, I had to explain this on Usenet multiple times. The most confusing part is that Advanced Search does ignore leading and trailing spaces... Ahasuerus 07:34, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
Thanks Ahasuerus, for giving me a backup ;) Mhhutchins, I think it really depends on some usage habits, for example lets say you would like to search for Silverberg using our search, by copy pasting his name from here to the search box, now if you double click on his name here and do copy, it will select his name plus the trailing space. This is how it works for me at least. Try it and you will see (unless you are using some other software that does it different?) This is just an example it works like this in many other instances. Qshadow 09:37, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
I copied "Silverberg" from here (but the odds of me or anyone ever do this is ridiculously low), pasted it into the Search box on the main page, and had five names returned. I guess my method of copying prevents leading or trailing spaces: I left click on the first character I want to copy and go forward to the last character. Once my selection is highlighted I hit CTRL-C. I don't understand why anyone would do a double-click on a single word. It's just as easy to type it in. Mhhutchins 18:39, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
Double-clicking on a word is handy in many cases. For example, in Firefox, when you highlight something and then right-click on the highlighted section, you can select "Search Google for ..." where "..." is the highlighted text. You can also install additional add-ons which will add other choices to the right-click menu, e.g. direct links to dictionaries and so on. So if you encounter a term that you are not too familiar with (say, floccinaucinihilipilification), you double click on it, then right click and select "Search Google" or "Define". There are other uses as well, but in general double-clicking is convenient and over time it becomes second nature.
To go back to the underlying issue, not only do general purpose search engines like Google/Yahoo, bookstores like Amazon/B&N, used book search engined like used.addall.com, etc strip leading and trailing spaces -- ISFDB also does it in most cases. All editing forms do it and Advanced Search does it for you. The main search box is the only part of the application which doesn't do it. Obviously, there are cases when it is useful to keep the leading/trailing spaces, but it's not the expected behavior. I think we should keep it as a selectable option, but not as the default. Ahasuerus 02:02, 5 November 2012 (UTC)
I would agree with Qshadow that our searches should work like the "standard" searches unless the user specifies otherwise. In Software Design, we call this "The principle of least surprise." And the standard web search trims spaces from the front and back of search terms. In fact, it's so common there's a Wikipedia page devoted to it. (They're somewhat mistaken about Perl, where they give the hard way to do it. The easy was is to use String::Util 'trim'.) I'm not sure whether the correct way to handle desired exceptions is to use preferences or to use quotes around a search term, but I would strongly endorse the use of trim for leading and trailing white spaces. And, as an example, I have several times fallen into the mistake of accidentally grabbing an extra space while doing a copy and paste into a search, and hence getting nothing. Chavey 17:28, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
I have one problem with changing the software to drop leading or trailing spaces: what if I wanted to search for "Anders" and not have to get all of those "Andersons" returned? Or I wanted to search for authors with last name starting with "Robert"? Do that many users really copy and paste a single word from one webpage into a another? Have internet users become that f'ing lazy? Mhhutchins 18:51, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
If Ahasuerus can implement the checkbox we were talking about and put it in "my preferences" (so that it will not need to be set for every search), you will not feel any change from how it works now. For new users that do not have an account it will work like they are used to. and if they want to look for "Robert" with space they know what to do already, they will use: "Robert ". Qshadow 22:47, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
No, that's what I would do, but only if I'd set my preference to not automatically remove spaces. Users without accounts wouldn't get a choice, and their searches would remove the space, and they would get all "Robert"s returned. At least, that's my understanding of what you're requesting. Otherwise, I'm totally lost. Mhhutchins 23:16, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
Maybe there is some misunderstanding, the users that enter "Robert " (with the quotation marks surrounding the name and the space) will not get their trailing space removed. This is how the standard convention goes. Trailing space is only removed if it is not protected by quotation marks. Hope it clears things up. Qshadow 23:49, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
Well, you never mentioned quotation marks. But honestly, how many users add quotation marks around a single word to ensure that their spaces are retained? Again, either you or I are projecting our search habits upon the average user. Unless there a legitimate study that can demonstrate how this mythical "average" person searches, we're both wasting our time. I can tell you how I search and you can tell me how you search, and neither one of us knows how the "average" user searches. Or I can admit that I don't. Mhhutchins 00:44, 5 November 2012 (UTC)
I just did a search with quotation marks and got nil results. Are you requesting that the database also change to a search that allows quotation marks? Again, I think the confusion arises out of a belief that searching a database is the same as using a search engine. They're not the same animal. Mhhutchins 00:49, 5 November 2012 (UTC)
Quotes are a whole different can of worms. Most search engines (including Amazon and such) do some type of blended, keyword or proximity search by default. If you use <Heinlein Starship> as your search string at Amazon or B&N, you will get a list of books (and DVDs) related to "Starship Troopers" because the search logic will try to be smart and look for all items with "Heinlein" and "Starship" in the title and author fields. If you enter <"Heinlein Starship"> as your search string, you will get very few (if any) hits because you told the search engine to override the default behavior. Which is all good and well, but that's not how ISFDB works at this time. Eventually we may want to make our search logic smarter, but it's a larger issues than the one that we are discussing right now. Ahasuerus 02:11, 5 November 2012 (UTC)
Ok, maybe Mhhutchins is right and we can't know what the average user likes I can't argue with this (although my personal opinion is to follow conventions). Anyway let's leave the default behavior for non members as it is now, the only thing I suggest is to give user some hint in case he got nil results because of spaces: 
A search for "Arena " found 0 matches, please try removing trailing or leading spaces.
This will solve our problems for now. And for members, Ahasuerus, please add this magic checkbox ;) Qshadow 09:11, 5 November 2012 (UTC)
FR 3584351 created. Ahasuerus 19:16, 5 November 2012 (UTC)
Ahasuerus, will I be able to set this ON/OFF in my preference, or will I have to check/uncheck it each search? (The FR doesn't give details) Qshadow 22:04, 5 November 2012 (UTC)
I am not 100% sure at this point. I suspect that we will end up with a new User Preference, but perhaps a better idea will come along between now and the time when this FR is implemented. We are up to 149 outstanding FRs, although the Bug count is down to 58. Ahasuerus 01:08, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Problems with Searching

This discussion brings to mind just how poorly our search help is documented. For example, in Advanced Search, why do some search fields require the exact and complete match of a word or phrase to bring results, while other fields will give results for incomplete (but exact) matches? I can search for "ander" in the Title Search form and bring up every title record with "ander" in the author field, including "anderson" as a first or last name. But if I search for instances of "audio" in the Binding field of the Publication Search form, it will only bring up those records that exactly match, and no records that contain "audio CD". Why does the wildcard character work in some fields and not others? And why is it so hard to search for anything in the Wiki? :) The least we can do is document these inconsistencies. I can only imagine how frustrating this could be to non-editing users. Mhhutchins 16:46, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Well, we have little control over the way the Wiki software (although it may get better once we upgrade it), but we can certainly change the way the Advanced Search logic works. In this case I think the current behavior is clearly the result of the designer assuming that binding codes did not need to support the partial match capability -- think "pb", "tp" and "hc", which is what we started with back in 1995. Let me fix it real quick... Ahasuerus 07:34, 11 November 2012 (UTC)
Done. I agree with the larger point, though: we need to document all exceptions and gotchas either in Help or on SourceForge (either as bugs or as feature requests.) Ahasuerus 07:40, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Magnetic Storm by Roger and Martyn Deans

In the Magnetic Storm there are seven parts, but only one (The War of the Worlds) is SF related. It consists of eleven pictures, some of them was used as covers or interior arts in other books (Browse inside from Harper Collins). But in Magnetic Storm they does not have any titles. All of them credited for Roger Dean (as designer) and Tim White and Richard Clifton-Dey (as painters). How should it be credited in publication record: in notes or in contents? Denis 18:55, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

If none of them are titled or captioned, they should be given the name of the work they illustrate. In this case, they illustrate a chapter titled "The War of the Worlds". That's how the first one will be titled. The second will have the same title, but add "[2]" to it. Go on until you've reached "[11]". Each work should be credited to the artist who painted it, not the one who designed the book. Mhhutchins 19:23, 15 November 2012 (UTC)
In the books there is: "The War of the Worlds series of paintings were design by Roger Dean and painted by: Tim White ... ; Richard Clifton-Dey ..." Denis 11:18, 16 November 2012 (UTC)
Feel free to credit the paintings as you wish based on the book in your hand. There's no field for a "designer" so wedge in Dean's credit the best you can if you feel it belongs in the record. Mhhutchins 19:04, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Question re anthology Cravings

I have my hands on an actual copy of the anthology Cravings (this publication), and the story by Laurell K. Hamilton is not titled "Beyond the Ardeur." It is titled "Blood upon My Lips." I do NOT have a copy of the hardcover version (this publication), so I do not know how the story appears there.

How should I handle correcting this? I am reluctant to do an "edit title" on "Beyond the Ardeur" without being sure how it appears in the other publication. Should I treat them as possible variant titles? What to do?

Thanks -- BungalowBarbara 04:30, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

The only way to change the title in one publication and not any other publication is to remove the title from the record of the verifiable edition, and add a content record for the new title. But in this case, I wouldn't bother changing only one. The SFBC printing is 100% likely to be identical to the paperback edition. Just go to the title record and click on "Edit Title Data" and change the name in the title field. But before you do that, a question: are you looking at the title page of the story and not the table of contents page? If the name of the story on its title page is "Blood upon My Lips", make the edit and I'll accept the submission. Mhhutchins 20:26, 19 November 2012 (UTC)
A Google search has shown that many readers refer to this story as "Beyond the Ardeur". Are you certain you have a first printing of the anthology? Mhhutchins 20:30, 19 November 2012 (UTC)
The ISBN matches the publication record, the copyright page says "Printing History: Jove edition / July 2004" and the number line on the copyright page is 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. I think that means a first printing -- how would I tell?
The story title is "Blood upon My Lips" everywhere in the book -- copyright page, table of contents, title page of story, and at the top of odd-numbered pages throughout the story. I also noted that some on-line reviews of the book refer to the story as "Before the Ardeur," which puzzles me. I wonder if it could be a pre-publication title that was changed. I do think it warrants some sort of note, just not sure how to handle it. BungalowBarbara 21:32, 19 November 2012 (UTC)
Proceed to update the title record and add a note that this story is aka "Before the Ardeur" but that there's no proof that it was ever published under that name. BTW, your copy is a first printing according to the number line. Mhhutchins 21:45, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

SeriesHeader

This template doesn't work when there is an apostrophe in the title of the series. Any software people know how to fix it? Mhhutchins 18:52, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Certain common characters, e.g. ! * ' ( ) ; : @ & = + $ , / ? % #, can't be used in URLs and have to be encoded by the software. We have a few bug reports re: this issue. I'll take a look... Ahasuerus 21:02, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Astounding/Analog (UK) table grid incompatible

The UK Astounding/Analog series tables seems to contradict itself on two different pages: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/seriesgrid.cgi?28873 http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/Series:Astounding/Analog_%28UK%29

The two tables do not match at all. Not only one table missed out the early editions and the other missed 1961-1963 issues, even the years that exist are completely different: e.g. check year 1944. in one list it has only one issue, and on another list it has 6 issues. Regards, Qshadow 10:04, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

It appears the Wiki list was compiled using Phil Stephensen-Payne's checklist (linked to at the bottom of the page). The Wiki page is not automatically generated the way the ISFDB grid is, and there are issues of Astounding/Analog UK noted in the Wiki page that no editor has yet been able to index in the ISFDB itself, such as the 'missing' issues from 1944.
Looking at the Wiki page history it appears most of the work was done in 2009 with a handful of edits done more recently this year. You can update the Wiki page yourself... eg. there's the whole year of 1955 in the database which has yet to be linked to from the Wiki page, plus many other entries. How about having a go? ;) PeteYoung 16:11, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for the explanation (and for suggestion ;) Qshadow 16:16, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
The database grid is only updated when editors (like you) create publication records and add them to the magazine's series. That's the only way to add issues to the issue grid. If there's no record in the database for an issue, then the grid will lack that issue. The Wiki page has no connection whatsoever with the database grid unless an editor links the individual database records to the Wiki page. That's all done manually by editors (like you). Mhhutchins 17:01, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Wretched Earth

I seem to have done something wrong. I added the cover artist to the entry http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?395230 and, surprise, what I have is an anomaly. Now, maybe this just shows up on my computer, but it certainly looks odd. What did I do? MLB 09:22, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

I see nothing wrong or strange. What is the problem? --Willem H. 10:16, 24 November 2012 (UTC)
My computer screen shows a page of blank space, then the entry. Maybe it's my computer. MLB 22:26, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
Looks fine on my computer. Is this the only page that's displayed this way? Mhhutchins 22:38, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Final Destination #6: Death of the Senses

I collect movie and media novelizations and tie-ins. Yes, I have no taste. However, be that as it may be, I have all of the Final Destination books, all but this one http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?182178. I tried to get this novel when it first came out, but Amazon kept listing it as "forthcoming", then it was listed as out-of-print and there were no used copies for sale, now the page has disappeared totally. Does anybody know if this book even exists? Was it ever published? Or does it exist only in an unpublished form? MLB 09:32, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

This says it was "recalled". You could try using the email listed here to ask Andy McDermott about it. --MartyD 12:03, 24 November 2012 (UTC)
Thank you. MLB 22:27, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Sub-series

I would like to add this title to the sub-series Chronicles of The Deryni. Can I enter directly the sub-series name in the series field of the title data, or is there a specific syntax for sub-series ? Thanks --Pips55 22:52, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

You enter the name of the series into which you wish to place the title, regardless of the series' hierarchy within another series. If a series doesn't exist, you can create one by updating the record. If necessary, you can then update the new series by placing it into another series (or placing another series under it.) Mhhutchins 00:08, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
Regarding the title you're working on: it should be made into a variant of this English title, which would automatically place it into the series of the parent title. So there's no need to enter any series data in the Italian title record. Mhhutchins 00:11, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
The fact is that my sources do not confirm that the Italian title is a translation of the English title, otherwise everything would have been more straightforward, of course.--Pips55 21:33, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
Perhaps not the title itself, but the Italian publication is the same publication as the English publication, which makes it a variant. As you can see, the contents of this publication are the same as this publication. The addition of an essay, whether as introduction or afterword, doesn't make it a new title. Both are omnibus publications of the first three novels in the series. That would mean that the Italian publication is not the original but a variant of the English one. Examples of other cases of this sort are here, and here. Mhhutchins 21:45, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
I see; I was figuring a more strict rule based on titles, not contents. Thanks --Pips55 22:04, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Generic variant titles such as "Part One"

This pub is a collection where the individual novelettes do not appear under their original name, but under the titles "Part One", "Part Two", etc. I am reluctant to create variant titles because these are such generic titles. Should I name the variants by following the same rules as we do for introductions, forewords etc.? For instance: "Part One (Quest of the Three Worlds")? I noticed that the varianting for this German pub has been done with the generic title only. Thanks for your advice, Patrick -- Herzbube Talk 01:06, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

This title has always been a headache and has been discussed before. If we were to follow basic ISFDB standards, this title and all of its publications would be changed from COLLECTION type to NOVEL type. It's possible these stories may have been altered from their original magazine appearance, making this a "fix-up". The author died the year of this work's first edition, so he may have added connecting material to the stories. (I've personally not compared the texts.) I know that in the edition in my collection there is no table of contents and the book was marketed as a novel, not a collection. So considered if we were to consider this a novel, we cannot add records to the database for "parts" of it. I can't speak for the German publication, but I would advise you not to change the names to "Part One", etc. in the English editions for fear that it could be used as a precedent for other editors to enter "parts" of other novels as content records. So you see the dilemma. It's in cases like this that you just have to go with the flow. Or you can contact each of the primary verifiers and ask them to participate in the discussion. Like you, it bugs me that the ISFDB records contain content records that don't match the actual book, so if it were up to me, I'd make it into a fix-up record and handle it like any other one (this one, for example.) Mhhutchins 01:44, 1 December 2012 (UTC)
Well, it seemed logical to me (pv of the german edition) that a COLLECTION should have some content, hence my listing of the separate parts. I would have no trouble with changing the whole Quest . . . to a NOVEL. Stonecreek 11:18, 1 December 2012 (UTC)
I see, it's more difficult than I thought. To be honest, seeking a resolution for this situation is at the moment not at the top of my priority list, so if you don't mind I would prefer to just leave the status quo and make a note of this as a personal future project of mine. I am not shying away from the responsibility so much as from bogging myself down with this task. My ISFDB presence currently is rather erratic, but at least I find some time. With this time I really would like to accomplish my first pass through my meager book collection - and I am quite excited about this at the moment, because after more than five years I finally see the end of this task approaching *apologetic smile* Patrick -- Herzbube Talk 15:38, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Primary verifiers of Apeman, Spaceman: Wells' The Man of the Year Million: SHORTFICTION or ESSAY?

An editor has found the above title as an ESSAY (and we already had it as such here), whereas previous publications in an anthology of a title with the same name have it as SHORTFICTION. A bibliography has this title also as ESSAY, so we are inclined towards merging the two as an ESSAY. Please think about this possibility and leave a message and read the last four or five paragraphs of the development. Stonecreek 14:43, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

I read the piece, and have no problem with a conversion to essay, but the other pv's should agree before anything is changed. Another thing, on the titlepage of my edition there's a subtitle ("A Scientific Forecast"). Is this also in the other editions of Apeman, Spaceman? --Willem H. 20:48, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
I reread the text and it seems to be superficial an essay, but in my opinion it could be also read as a fictional short story. I'm not a literature scholar, who could decide it, but it'd be all rigt for me to change it into an essay. Rudam 10:06, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
I checked my copy (Penguin, 1979) and The Man of the Year Million is in this edition indeed subtitled "A Scientific Forecast", which might make it look like an essay. Citing a Professor Holzkopf (Woodhead) at Weissnichtwo (Dunnowhere) however throws doubt as to the science content. I think it is short fiction, disguised as an essay.--Dirk P Broer 10:26, 17 December 2012 (UTC)
However, I came across the same story under the title of 'Of a Book Unwritten' in Certain Personal Matters, the collected essays of H. G. Wells. It is thus considered to be an essay, despite the fictious character of said Professor Holzkopf.--Dirk P Broer 19:37, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Uploading new image

I'm trying to upload a new image for a pub, but it displays the old image after upload. Publication in question is Damia by Anne McCaffrey. The original image is a little blurry and I'm trying to upload a clearer image. But as I said, the old image never goes away. What am I doing wrong?--Astromath 19:12, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Probably nothing: could be your browser that is keeping the old image in the cache. Try refreshing the cache (usually F5 on most keyboards/browsers). --Pips55 21:41, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
Seems to be fixed now. Thx.--Astromath 23:29, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Editing facilities are currently offline

Need help edting a pub. The pub "Get Off the Unicorn" dated 1990-06-00 (17th printing) [1] needs the following changes:
1) Add cover image found here: [2]
2) Edit note to change "cover not visibly signed" to "cover signed in lower right corner below imbedded eggshell" (or something like that).

P.S. I noticed that the cover image for the "date unknown" has a couple of watermarks on the image that seem to advertise some online store and should be removed.--Astromath 03:36, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Editing has been re-enabled -- please see the ISFDB:Community Portal for details. Ahasuerus 03:59, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

G-8 and His Battle Aces

I’m stuck. I’d like to enter my run of Adventure House facsimile reprints of the G-8 and His Battle Aces onto this site but I’m unsure as how to enter them. Yes, the novels are of a fantastic nature. The early reprints only reprinted the lead novel and the letter feature. Then later issues included a backup short story or two. This may be that early issues of the pulp had more pages than the later ones. Do I list these as novels, anthologies, or magazines? I don’t own the original pulps so I can’t check and see if any of the reprints are complete and what has been edited out. Since the early reprints only reprinted the novels and the later ones, they are up to over forty reprints by now, seem to be reprinting much of the whole magazine (?), any single listing wouldn’t be a good fit for all of the reissues. If it helps, Adventure House is reprinting the novels in the order in which they were originally published.

And how would I list them? As G-8 and His Battle Aces, Date: Novel Title or just G-8 and His Battle Aces, Date, and then list the novel’s title in the Content field? The title page just states G-8 and His Battle Aces and the novel’s title, but the facsimiles also reprints the whole pulp’s contents page, although these early contents pages have been obviously tampered with. I’m confused and open for suggestions. MLB 11:02, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

IMO, facsimile reprints of an entire issue of a magazine should be typed as MAGAZINE. A reprint of selections from an issue should be typed as ANTHOLOGY. This is only my opinion, because I don't think there is a stated policy. There may have to be a Rules & Standards discussion to resolve this issue, so don't expect a definite answer otherwise.
As for titles, if the publication only reprints the lead novel, then it should be titled the same as the novel and typed as NOVEL, regardless of how it's branded on the cover. If it reprints the entire contents of the issue, it should be titled the same as the original issue and typed as MAGAZINE. If it reprints selections, then it should be titled whatever appears on its title page and typed as ANTHOLOGY. Mhhutchins 16:54, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
If you go here G-8 #25 you will see how I am entering these reprints. They still don't look quite right to me. I think they should be listed as a collection as the contents (at least the fiction) is all by the same author, and even the date of the magazine should be used instead of the way that I'm listing them. Any suggestions? MLB 03:03, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

Leisure Books - Bibliography

Leisure Books - Bibliography: webpage link produces a 404 file not found error.--Astromath 13:18, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

The page is now available, so it must have been a temporary service interruption. Ahasuerus 15:42, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
Ahasuerus, did you interpret that as the ISFDB page or the http://www.dorchesterpub.com/Dorch/about.cfm link? Because the latter shows a 404 error for me. Based on the top level (http://www.dorchesterpub.com) are they even still in business? -- JLaTondre (talk) 23:45, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
Oh, I see! Sorry, I misunderstood the comment. Yes, Dorchester went out of business a few months ago and sold its contracts to Amazon. As Publishers Weekly wrote back in August:
  • Following an auction that concluded August 28, Amazon Publishing has acquired the publication contracts of over 1,000 books from Dorchester Publishing. The auction was set in motion in late June as a way for the publisher’s owner, John Backe, to earn back some of the $3.4 million he was owed by the moribund company. Amazon made the initial bid and competitors had until mid-August to come up with a counter offer.
We may want to change the URL to this WayBackMachine one, which appears to be stable. Ahasuerus 01:37, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
Unfortunately, that link seems to be mostly unusable. The "search" function doesn't work (which is to be expected). But if you select a link from their menus, e.g. from "Horror Authors" or "Horror Categories", you get a "The requested resource is not available" error. So there doesn't seem to be an easy way of getting much of any information off that Wayback page. Chavey 20:52, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
The WayBackMachine is not perfect, but quite a bit of the information is still accessible (while the category drop downs don't work, you can get to the author pages via the normal links). That's far better than the current link which doesn't work at all. I've replaced the exiting link and made a note the publisher is no longer in business. -- JLaTondre (talk) 14:11, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Multiple essays, used as anthology entries

In the anthology Saving Worlds, the editors (Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd) include several essays by Roger Lovin, which had been published in the Los Angeles Free Press as installments from his "Ecommando Tactics" column. They were used as parts of the introductions to 5 of the stories in that anthology. They are not listed in the ToC, but are listed in the credits. Contento1 lists the first of these as a separate essay, but does not include the others. I have (tentatively) listed all 5 of the essays as separate content items. But I can imagine returning to the "one only" contents listing, with extra notes on that content item. Which way should they be listed? Chavey 06:57, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

I'd go for the way you have done it. If they are used as introductions to different stories than why not show this in the contents listing? (Seems only logical to me). Stonecreek 15:02, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Clarification needed on login procedure.

I'm a new user, it took me some time to figure this out, but it may not be obvious to a less technical new user. This is the process I ran into. The top of the main DB page showed that I was logged out. The link has me create a Wiki Login. The Verification link that is emailed out redirects you to the wiki as well. All this time the main page is still showing that you are not logged even though you are logged into the wiki. You need to put in a note someplace, maybe after being directed back to the wiki letting people know that they now need to do a separate 'login' action on the main page with the credentials since that doesn't actively recognize the authentication status.

As a second part, after updating preferences, you should be returned to the page that contains the link to the preference you update. Example [http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/mypreferences.cgi] returns you to a page saying that the preference was updated. The only link lets you change the preference again. A normal UI would return you to [http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/mypreferences.cgi]. If you are seeing specific cases of the update not being accepted, an error page should be generated and logged. The page saying the update succeeded is probably not required. With the current setup, you have to go back to the left menu to get back into the Preferences Tree or click back twice. Both options require manual interaction where none is really needed. Thoughts? Rowan 09:12, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, great feedback! This is exactly what we have been missing -- recent experiences with the registration process by people new to ISFDB. Most of us have been using it for so long that it seems clear to us even though it may be opaque to new users. I have created FR 3596623 and FR 3596624 based on your comments. (Of course, we have 165 open Feature Requests and 60 open Bugs, so it may be some time before the concerns are addressed.) Ahasuerus 20:13, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Using Advanced Search to search for specific length stories like novellas?

I can't figure out how to search by length of story using the Advanced Search feature on the homepage. I started out looking for novellas, and it seems as if what I want is storylen= novella, but that only returns 2 entries total. I've tried all-caps and it doesn't change anything. I feel foolish. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Creedofhubris (talk • contribs) .

Oh no, it's not you, it's the software that is, er, not very bright. The database uses "nv" for "novella", "nt" for "novelette" and "ss" for "short story", but it's not explained on the Advanced Search page. I will add a note shortly -- thanks for the feedback! Ahasuerus 13:24, 17 December 2012 (UTC)
Added. Ahasuerus 14:03, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume - UK version

Our verified record for The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume Four says "No price stated on the unclipped dusk jacket", but now we have an editor with a copy which "clearly states the price in the lower right-hand corner of the front flap". Unfortunately, the primary verifier is not active, so we can't ask him to check if he may have missed the price.

The question then is whether anyone else may have a copy or be aware of another version of this pub, perhaps a book club reprint?

P.S. Please note that this is Gollancz's 1981 version of what latter appeared in the US as The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume III. Arthur C. Clarke was listed as the sole editor in the UK while the US version listed both Clarke and Geo. W. Proctor as editors. It is not the same as the 1986 The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume IV edited by Terry Carr for Avon. Ahasuerus 06:47, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Robert Presslie - dates of birth and death

I see that the following message was left on an unrelated Wiki page earlier today:

  • Detail that needs amending - Robert Presslie is my father. His birth date and year is January 11 1920 Father died September 5 2000 RIP
  • Signed Valerie M Turner

I wonder if one of our author-savvy editors might be in a position to confirm this? Ahasuerus 22:59, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

Currey and Tuck and Titus Groan

I've some questions on how to interpret Currey's entry on Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan which also disagrees with Tuck's entry. This refers to the revised edition of Currey which contains a note, and a correction not in the hardback edition. The note states:

"TITUS GROAN was published in February 1946. At least three dust jackets were prepared for copies of the first impression, the second and third definitely later, but sequence of issue not established: (A) no reviews printed on front flap; price 15s/Net printed at right, below last line of copy; (B) Extracts from six book reviews printed on front flap; no printed price below flap copy, small label with price 18/-/NET affixed below last line of copy; (C) Extracts from six book reviews printed on front flap; Second / Impression printed at left, below last line of copy, 15s/Net printed at right, below last line of copy, small label with price 18/-/NET pasted over printed price."

I think Currey is stating that there were three printings and he can't determine how to tell which is which. However, I could read it as 3 jackets were done for 1 printing of the book and the precedence of the 2nd and 3rd jacket is unknown. Indeed, I originally interpreted it that way when I first read it. I received a copy of of this book with the C state jacket except that mine has no label over the price (with no evidence that there ever was one). Additionally, my copy has the "first published in MCMXLVI". Since the C jacket explicitly states "second impression", it would seem to indicate to me that it is the 2nd printing and I don't know why Currey would say its precedence can't be determined. Tuck only has one printing in 1946 with with a price of 14/- and lists no other printings until 1968, which has a different page count. So, my questions are:

  1. Is Curry detailing 3 printings of the book or just the jacket? I'm leaning towards 3 printings of the book.
  2. Depending on the answer to the above, how many publication records should we record? Should we have separate publication records for different jacket states? Assuming 3 printings of the book, I think we'd want three publication records. Should they all have a 1946 date (as stated in the book), or should the second and third printings/impressions be entered with an unknown date.
  3. Regardless of the above, Tuck's price disagrees with what Currey states is printed on the jacket. Since Currey is a later reference and is quoting prices as printed in the book, I would lean towards using his. However, I'm not sure if we should go with the printed price or the label price for the C state.

Thanks in advance for folks' answers/opinions on how to interpret this. --Ron ~ RtraceTalk 02:35, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

You can get more detail by looking at the 5 copies that Currey currently has for sale, where he is using more complete knowledge than he had when writing that book. For example, this copy has a first impression dj which is described as having:
A ... first state dust jacket (printed price "15s/Net" on front flap; no "Second / Impression" statement and no extracts from six book reviews printed on front flap)
In other words, this is DJ "A" in his book. Another copy has a second impression dj and is:
First edition, second issue with dust jacket marked "second impression.". ... A second issue dust jacket with extracts from six book reviews printed on front flap, "Second / Impression" printed at left, below last line of copy, "15s/Net" printed at right, below last line of copy.
In other words, this is DJ "C" in his book, but without that sticker. I would assume that the version with the sticker is that same second impression, but sold later when they had decided to raise the price. Currey does not currently have a copy with DJ "B", but since that edition has a higher price, I would assume it is a 3rd impression. Because Currey's bookstore specifies that the second impression of the dj corresponds to a second impression of the book, I would assume that these three dj's correspond to three printings of the book. Personally, I would prefer to see 3 publication records. (I would like to see information that allows collectors to identify exactly what they have, although we do occasionally distinguish states only in the notes, as with Book Club editions.) In his current listings, Currey lists the date of both the first and second impressions as 1946, and I would use that for our listing as well. I am not sure how to list the date for the 3rd impression. For the prices, I would use the Currey prices of 15/-, 15/-, and 18/- for the 1st, 2nd, & 3rd impressions. Chavey 04:45, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Linking question

Re: Tau Zero
I have just confirmed that the artist is indeed Richard Powers here. Is it appropriate to add the link to the notes section showing where I found the confirmation?--Astromath 15:58, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

You should not reference flickr images nor link an ISFDB record to any other unstable website. There is nothing authoritative about the credits given to flickr images and they are not considered dependable enough to be a reliable secondary source. Although I would agree that the cover was very likely painted by Powers, without a signature or a definitive source, it should only be speculated in the note field. Mhhutchins 17:00, 30 December 2012 (UTC)
Ok. You've answered my question. I'll direct rest of my questions about the signature itself to the community forum.--Astromath 18:12, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Another printing question

If a second printing (or nth printing) is 100% identical to a prior printing with the exception of the number line, which is more appropriate: to clone the prior printing? or to add a note to the prior printing saying that the nth printing is identical to the prior printing?--Astromath 00:28, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

In almost all situations, it's better to clone the prior printing and then update the notes, including the printing number. We make exceptions for Book Club printings, partly because those are harder to identify. I have also occasionally made exceptions for books with a large number of editions (e.g. more than a couple of dozen) and many printings of some of those editions. Even that exception will raise the eyebrows of some of my fellow moderators. Chavey 01:42, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
Not this one. If I have a much later printing, I will identify it as stated, and PV the record. But I will not go back and create records for the missing printings based on publication history statements. (A relatively rare number of titles in my collection are more than the second printing of the edition.) Darrah Chavey is correct that you should create a new record for later printings but only if you're working from a book in hand. But you can still add a note to the record that it is identical to an earlier printing, if you have copies of both books in hand. Just because the limited number of fields in an ISFDB record can identify the publication, it doesn't mean that there aren't other factors that would make this printing unique other than a number line on the copyright page. Mhhutchins 07:06, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

SF Databases in other languages?

Do you know about non English SF databases like ISFDB but in other languages? Here is what I know of: 

German: dsfdb.org
Russian: fantlab.org
Czech: bibliograf.cz; legie.info

What about: 

French
Italian
Dutch
Spanish
Portuguese
Polish
etc...

please add links if you can, any language is welcome.

Thanks, Qshadow 20:46, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

There are some here. Hauck 21:10, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
Thanks a lot! Qshadow 02:53, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
For Scandinavian countries there is only a Swedish library link but it has only 28 SF titles and anyway it is not SF focused. Do any serious SF Database exist for any of the Scandinavian countries? Qshadow 17:23, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
They have a fair amount of SF, it's just not necessarily tagged that way. For example, they have over 500 books edited/written by Sam Lundwall Ahasuerus 19:33, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Variant Title in Non-Genre Anthology

The Silverberg story Hot Sky was published in Boats: An Anthology as Greenhouse Days on the High Seas. This variant title is not yet present in the ISFDB. Since the anthology is a non-genre anthology, I wonder if it should be added to the ISFDB, or if the variant title should only be mentioned in the note section of the Hot Sky title record. However in that case, the variant title would neither be visible on the author summary page nor findable via the search. Thanks, Darkday 18:32, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

It's not necessary to create a publication record for a non-genre anthology just to add a variant title of a genre story. You can create a title record for the variant title by going to the title record and clicking on the link "Add a Variant Title or Pseudonymous Work to This Title" under Editing Tools menu. On the next screen, replace the title field with the variant title, change the date field for the publication date of this title and in the Note field record the title of the anthology, its editor, publisher and date of publication. Thanks. Mhhutchins 19:44, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Searching for a title

Is it possible to find copies of either "Tomorrow x Four" or Richard McKenna's story from that book ("The Night of Hoggy Darn")? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Gkdehaan (talk • contribs) .

Hi, and welcome. Yes, go to http://www.isfdb.org/, type "Hoggy Darn" in the box at the left, and click on the menu below that, changing "Name" to either "Fiction Titles" or "All Titles", and click GO. You'll get a list, and in there you'll find this link to the story and all of its appearance. If you searched for "Tomorrow x" instead, you'd end up with this link to the anthology. --MartyD 12:55, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
The most recent publication of the story is in this book. Under the "Other Sites" menu (on the left side of the screen), there are links to several websites who offer copies, including Amazon and Abebooks.com (who list dealers who are selling copies for as little as $3.49 postpaid.) Mhhutchins 17:40, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Changing Title Reference

This Italian pub presents a Title reference that points directly (not as a variant) to the English original. To add the correct bibliographic record, I could delete and re-enter the pub (it was only yesterday that I changed the content from English to Italian ...) but I wonder if there are other solutions. Thanks --Pips55 20:53, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes. Unmerge it from the title record. Once unmerged it's given its own title record. Then change the language field of the new title record and make it a variant of the original language title record. Mhhutchins 21:25, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
Step by step:
  1. Go to the original title record (in this case here).
  2. Click on "Unmerge Titles" under the Editing Tools menu.
  3. On the next screen check the box(es) of the publications which you want to unmerge (there are two of them in this case).
  4. Submit, and then accept the submission.
  5. Do a search for the title record. (In this case, "Il secondo libro dei robot" and there are two of them, which is not usually the case. Sub-steps for this unusual case: Merge the two titles into one. Submit and accept. Go back to the now single title record.)
  6. Edit the title record to set the correct language.
  7. Submit and accept.
  8. Go back to the title record.
  9. Click on "Make This Title a Variant Title or Pseudonymous Work" under the Editing Tools menu.
  10. Enter the record number of the original title record (in this case "37675")
  11. Submit and accept.
Mhhutchins 21:32, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
Done, thanks --Pips55 22:05, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

new user question - adding an artist attribution

After registering as a new user, I submitted an attribution for the cover artist of this book: "Daughter of Is" http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?255635 I know this artist is Carlos Ochagavia, due to the style, period, publisher, and initials "C.O."

Later I noticed a "user registration confirmation" email, that I hadn't yet clicked on. The following day, I logged on to check my "talk" section, and also looked around at the "my contributions" logs. I can't find any trace of that submission, or another one that I attempted (adding the 1959 Fawcett Gold Medal series # S929 edition of this: Emperor Fu Manchu http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?15327). For that submission, I have also now uploaded the cover (by Robert Abbett). Wondering how to link it to the record, assuming it gets approved?

Are the edits I try to make on a page (like the ones linked above) only visible in the log AFTER a moderator has approved them? Or do I not have permission to even submit them? In short, how do I generally know the status of anything I have submitted? Or should I just kick back and log in once a week or so? Thanks! --Lex 18:48, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Edits are not visible until a moderator approves them. Sometimes there can be a bit of delay due to moderator availability and number of submissions. It usually doesn't take too long however. You can see you pending edits by clicking the "My Pending Edits" on the left hand side of the ISFDB pages.
To add an uploaded image to a publication. You edit the publication and place the URL to the ISFDB image (not to the wiki page) in the ImageURL field. See Help:Screen:EditPub#ImageURL for more information. However, if you have already submitted an edit to that pub, you generally should wait for that first edit to be approved before making another. -- JLaTondre (talk) 19:42, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Seeing my verifications - question

Does the link for "My Primary Verifications" show just the verifications that are "Primary," or does it include "Primary2" etc? And what about "Primary (Transient)?" Is there a way to see these? (I do a lot of Transient verifications of books I get out from the library.) BungalowBarbara 05:42, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

It lists "Primary2", etc., but I don't believe it lists "Primary (Transient)". -- JLaTondre (talk) 12:40, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
As the inventor of both, I can confirm that only Primary 1-5 are included. There are weaknesses in the coding that I haven't addressed yet - e.g. I get one very long list that would be better broken up into separate pages: if anyone adds Primary 6,7 etc then the code won't automatically include them: there is only chronological order, no choice of sorting by title or author, etc. Now that Ahasuerus is catching up on my past code changes I may look at these again soonish, so get your feature requests in! BLongley 16:34, 13 January 2013 (UTC)
I just realised it is 6 years to the day since my first verification - I feel so old now! The software changes are a lot newer. I think there were two reasons for the My Primary Vers list - 1) people make a lot of mistakes at first, and it would be good to know where you started so you can recheck after a bit more experience, and 2) you could use the list as a "books I own" list. I'm not sure how many people use the first reason, but the second reason has problems as there are now many books with all the primary slots taken. One FR I must create is a way to reshuffle the lists when someone removes a verification or moves their Primary to a Transient when they part with the book. And maybe we need more Transient slots? BLongley 16:54, 13 January 2013 (UTC)
He's alive! ;-) Good to hear from you, Bill. Ahasuerus 21:54, 13 January 2013 (UTC)
Alive yes, but not sure why. All I got for Christmas was hallucinations, and by New Year I was hospitalised: I'm out and about now but have four or more specialist appointments to get to. BLongley 23:22, 13 January 2013 (UTC)
That doesn't sound like a great way to spend the holidays. Hopefully the hallucinations were not too bad (I wouldn't mind purple elder gods from outer space wearing kimonos but only if they behaved themselves) and won't be coming back. Ahasuerus 04:41, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
The hallucinations were a mixed bag until I learnt to deal with them. The bad things (plagues of ants and maggots) I learnt to dismiss with a long stare and a short blink. Purple did appear in the form of mystic writings in purple on whatever surface I was looking at. I never did decipher a single one though - but I don't read 'elder god' (Shame really, I'm sure the Cthulhu dictionary would be a big seller.). BLongley 07:15, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
As far as verifications go, there are a few outstanding FRs to make them more useful, including FR 3089013 "Prevent accidental removal of verifications" and, less trivially, FR 3598471 "Auto-notify verifiers when a pub has been changed". I am thinking that in the long run we may want to treat multiple verifications the way we treat multiple authors, i.e. add an "Add Verification" button to the verification page. Ahasuerus 21:54, 13 January 2013 (UTC)
Yes, I think we need to look at removing the limits on Primary Verifications, and allow people to deliberately remove them without messing up the displays. I intend to get rid of a thousand books or so but don't want to do that till I can be sure it doesn't make books look totally unverified even if slots 2-5 remain filled. But first I need to get my "new" PC into development state - so far I've got Windows 7 updated but am having problems with the latest MySQL. BLongley 23:22, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

GIF or PNG image formats

The Upload file page states that permitted file types are png, gif, jpg, jpeg, but when I try to upload a GIF or PNG cover file I receive an error. Is it a known issue or am I missing something ? --Pips55 21:49, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

I just added a png image to this pub and it worked fine. However, I had to change the value of the "Destination filename" field from CRTRSCHLDR2011.jpg to CRTRSCHLDR2011.png (note the extension) before the software would let me upload it. I suspect that the software compares the format of the incoming file with the extension and rejects the file if they do not match. Ahasuerus 22:34, 13 January 2013 (UTC)
Do you know if it's possible to add some more formats? I know I was frustrated when I started writing "How to use the ISFDB" and couldn't post drafts for review here. BLongley 23:55, 13 January 2013 (UTC)
I am not sure. There are some settings that control the way the MediaWiki application handles various formats and it may be possible to make changes, but I don't know much about it. Ahasuerus 04:43, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
I know zero about it. I haven't even attempted to install a local MediaWiki. Maybe I'll try on the "new" PC that I'm breaking in in my spare time. BLongley 07:24, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
In LocalSettings.php, modify (or add): 
 $wgFileExtensions = array('png', 'gif', 'jpg', 'jpeg', 'doc', 'xls', 'mpp', 'pdf', 'zip', 'rtf', 'txt' );
 $wgStrictFileExtensions = false;
 $wgUploadSizeWarning = 2048000;
The first lists the extensions to allow. The second if "true" does not permit other extensions to be uploaded, if "false" allows them to be uploaded but with a warning. The third specifies the maximum size (in bytes) permitted before a warning is issued. --MartyD 00:47, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, I'll take a look! BTW, I am not sure we want to allow zip uploads since we have a limited amount of disk space. When posting draft documents, it may be better to use Google Docs (which gives you 5GB for free) or a similar service. Ahasuerus 23:27, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
On the contrary, I believe zip uploads should be encouraged 'because' they are smaller. In my example of "How to use the ISFDB" the .doc is over 3 meg, the .rtf is 30 meg. (Lots of pictures!) I'd like to make it available here rather than use another service. The limited feedback I got indicates it would be a good guide for beginners but it's still only half-written and already it's almost twice the size of this proposed limit. BLongley 03:33, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
The first thought that comes to mind is whether .doc would be the best format for our documentation. Would a Wiki page (or a collection of Wiki pages) with embedded ISFDB-hosted images be workable? It will likely reduce the disk space requirements and also ensure that only changed images need to be re-uploaded. We have less than 20GB of disk space left and I have no way of adding more, so any multi-MB uploads are problematic. Ahasuerus 19:42, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
Is the Wiki space less limited or is it part of the remaining 20 GB? BLongley 20:51, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
We have 40GB for everything -- the database, the Wiki, our software, images, etc -- and we have used up 20GB. We also need some of this disk space for operations (backups, database optimization, and so on.) My concern is that as more and more images get uploaded we will start bumping up against the upper limit and I am not sure how easy it will be to get more space from the hosting company (and how much it will cost.) I guess I will need to ping Al about this issue. Ahasuerus 23:03, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
I started writing the book as it meant I could post pictorial examples (Bluesman likes those a lot) without risking them becoming obsolete. I guess I can finish it and publish it via Smashwords or suchlike, and if they don't let me price it as free I can at least post a link here with a 100% discount code for our users. Hey, I'd even be able to post myself as a proper bibliography-related book author! BLongley 20:51, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
Secondly, one of my secret desires that neither a FR or a Bug report quite qualifies for is that our help pages (if we can pin them down to some form of stability) should be available in our most common other languages. There's no chance of me redoing them in French, German, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Hungarian, Bulgarian or any of the other languages that we are covering more now, but I suspect we'd gain more contributors if they didn't have to be prolific in English. I don't know if we can press-gang our experts into doing all that work, but obviously we would add a lot of wiki pages for each new language. BLongley 20:51, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
That's ... a lot work. It's hard enough to translate everything, but keeping all pages in sync will be even harder. If we want to go down that route, we probably need to start by making all ISFDB pages displayable in multiple languages. A few decades ago I worked with a software package which let you display each prompt, link, help pop-up (yes, we had pop-ups on semi-dumb terminals!) in multiple languages. It sold well in Canada and apparently in some parts of Europe, but the software was significantly more complicated than it would have been otherwise. Ahasuerus 23:09, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
And thirdly (I knew I'd forgotten something!) another long term ambition was to post some short videos that demonstrate some of our rules - a picture is worth a thousand words, a video should be worth a few more. Simple things like demonstrating a title page and explaining why we use that rather than a copyright page. Or showing two copies of the same book and explaining why they're variants, or different printings. I have a small video camera somewhere (in one of the boxes from the last move, unfortunately) and if I can grow another arm or get somebody to help me then I could add some pretty useful stuff that doesn't work well in words (judging by the number of repeated comments some moderators have to make). Can we afford disk space for such? BLongley 21:09, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
I think a third party host like YouTube would be a better choice due to the disk space considerations discussed above. Ahasuerus 23:10, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Artist credits

I have information regarding attribution/artist credits, and can help fill in some blanks "artist unknown" - just need to know who I can contact to give them the pertinent info. Can't seem to find a way to contact moderators - who should I email? thank you, Jane Frank —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Wowart (talk • contribs) .

As you have a wiki account, you have an ISFDB account and can make the edits yourself. Go to the main ISFDB page (http://www.isfdb.org), click the login link on the left side, and use the same account and password as the wiki. If you don't feel comfortable editing yourself, I would suggest posting your information at ISFDB:Community Portal. -- JLaTondre (talk) 01:45, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
If you are the real Jane Frank, we'd certainly appreciate the input! Welcome aboard! BLongley 03:39, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

The Artist E. T. Broeck Steadman

While browsing this artist’s website [3]here. I found a number of covers that are attributed to (Evan Tenbroeck) Broeck Steadman. Check out The Beast #2 here and The Beast 2 here on the artist’s website. There are two pages on this site for the same artist. Should both entries be merged? MLB 22:51, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Well, there has to be more than one page: one for every pseudonym. They are created automatically when entering a new name. But if you found another entry for 'The Beast 2': they would have to be merged if by (exactly) the same author and made into a variant of the canonical author (Broeck Steadman) if by a pseudonym. Hope this clears things up. Stonecreek 08:34, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

How to submit a Feature Request

How do I submit a Feature Request? I have seen references to doing this, but cannot find a "how-to" in the most common help pages. Thanks! BungalowBarbara 20:49, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

See this obscure part of our help. The second link is the one you want, it covers Feature Requests and Bug Reports. We don't really use the rest of the Sourceforge capabilities, but if you can state the requirements or problem clearly on Sourceforge then it won't get lost on an archived wiki page here. (I've just been discussing the weaknesses of our processes, but this one should work better than most of our poorly-documented ideas.) BLongley 22:02, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Self Promoting Biography/Bibliographic Notes

What should be done with Tony Thorne Mbe's Biography and Bibliographic Comments entered on his author page? This appears to be in violation of ISFDB Policy against self-promotion.Rkihara 17:51, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

Well, I guess the first step is to talk to him. Point out where he's breaking policy: suggest alternatives like putting his home page URL in the author info, removing reviews or creating the publications that contain the reviews (if they're relevant publications), or converting them into Synopses at title level. There's obviously a lot of rework to do. BLongley 18:13, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
By the way , it's not "Mbe" it's "MBE" and should be separated from the name by a comma, like most other titles like "PhD". (MBE is short for "Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire". He obviously deserves a bit of respect for that achievement alone.) BLongley 18:13, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
I see that he's also chosen to post the info on the only version of his name that ISN'T varianted to his canonical name! He (or someone else with more time and experience) needs to fix that too. "Tony" is actually short for "Anthony" in this case, which should be recorded. No idea what his middle initial "C" is for though. BLongley 18:22, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
And finally (as I must take a break soon), he seems to have a Wikipedia page. Adding that would solve a lot of our problems with his self-promotion - or maybe he wrote that Wikipedia page himself too? BLongley 18:28, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
His talk page is empty, but I'll leave a note there. If I get no response, I'll delete the bio and biblio entries since the changes can be reverted if he wants to re-edit the entries. I'll add the Wikipedia reference and fix the Mbe.--Rkihara 01:14, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
It looks like A. C. Thorne/Tony C. Thorne AKA Tony Thorne(MBE) did some publishing when he was 3 years old! Neeeds a bit more fixing.Kraang 02:39, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
Tony Thorne (Wiki), and Tony Thorne MBE appear to be two different people. The one referenced in the Wiki was born in Cairo, while the latter was born in London in 1926. One work by the former is mixed in with the latter's.--Rkihara 17:21, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Excerpts

I was under the impression that excerpts were available to read from this website. However I haven't been able to access any excerpts. Have I made a mistake in assuming this?

BobD

I'm afraid so. We occasionally record the existence of excerpts, but we actively discourage entering them in full. The nearest we get is a Title-level synopsis and that is still one of our weaker areas. Sorry if you've been misled - what made you think we did such? BLongley 20:27, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
With a bit further thought, I can offer a bit more hope. We DO have author webpage links, publisher webpage links, title Wikipedia links, and notes at several levels. So while we don't have excerpts here, we may be offering you a way to get to such in just a few more clicks. Does that help? BLongley 20:42, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

Archiving help wanted

Despite my hyper-activity recently, I'm suffering from the downgrade in my internet connection since I moved. (I've gone from a great Cable service to a poor ADSL one.) Can someone with a better connection than I now have please do some archiving for me - there's lots of pages that are now literally taking minutes to load. :-( BLongley 21:26, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

I would gladly do it. Just give me a list. Over the past year or so, the task of archiving the Community pages (Help desk, Moderator noticeboard, Community Portal, and Verification requests) has fallen to me, but I try to keep the last three months or so when archiving older posts. I've noticed that some new users (Ofearna, for example) have learned how to archive their talk pages, while the ones of other users are getting rather long. Are those the ones you're speaking of? Mhhutchins 03:33, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
Yes, a lot of the most problematical ones have been user talk pages. I'm afraid I can't recall exactly which ones - and strangely the worst ones become OK if I'm patient - there's obviously some caching going on. I'll start keeping notes - that will help pass the time while I'm waiting at least! BLongley 06:16, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
Just me moaning about it seems to have resolved the problem. Or it may be the cold weather, turning my phone line into a super-conductor. Or maybe I've just been so hyper recently that everything I want to read is now cached. BLongley 01:05, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
I'll keep an eye out for long pages and try to help the "offenders" if they request it. Mhhutchins 21:04, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
I just noticed we get a "WARNING: This page is 48 kilobytes long; some browsers may have problems editing pages approaching or longer than 32kb. Please consider breaking the page into smaller sections." Maybe that would be a good guideline? Or is that out-of date? I certainly don't have that problem in Firefox, I'm not THAT badly off - but maybe our Dial-up users (if we have any) are. Ironically, one of our biggest problems is actually our home page, what with all those birth/death dates and pictures of forthcoming books. (We really do need someone to create a NO IMAGES user preference, or even better a mobile-friendly version of our entire site.) BLongley 13:50, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
OK, the problem has returned. I've obviously found a few pages that weren't cached - the "super-conductor" idea was obviously a wrong one, as it's even colder here now. I think the guidelines might be >100k for a page, or 50-100 subsections? BLongley 01:45, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
My limit seems to be around 100 topics, but it depends upon whether some of them are particularly postings-heavy. I usually don't check the size (kb-wise) of a page before I archive it. But your guidelines seem reasonable. Do we force someone to archive their page, or just strongly suggest it, like I've been doing in the past? Mhhutchins 02:25, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
May the FORCE be non-existent with you! ;-) Stick with the "strongly suggest". Maybe we can eventually get some Wiki-experienced developers to automate the process, but I'm nowhere near that level of developer yet. BLongley 02:59, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Question re dates in Locus1

I am looking at this item in Locus1 and I see the date is given as "May ’92 [Jun ’92]" -- what does this mean? I cannot find an explanation of it (maybe I just don't know where to look). Which one is the publication date and what is the other date? Thanks. BungalowBarbara 19:49, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

They give the publisher's publication date first and then give the date they received their copy in brackets. Mhhutchins 20:27, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
Most of the time the two dates are close, but in cases of delayed publication they can differ significantly (up to a few years!), so it can be a red flag and further digging may be warranted. Ahasuerus 20:53, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
Yes, it can be years after publication that the publisher finally gets around to sending them a copy. (The SFBC stop sending Locus copies back in 2009, and have only recently started sending them copies of SFBC originals, but sporadically at that.) Mhhutchins 21:03, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
Well, if it's just a matter of the publisher taking his time sending a copy to Locus, it shouldn't affect our records. But if the title pages says "2009" while the book was actually published in 2012 (according to the publisher's Web site and other usual suspects), then we probably want to document the fact in the Notes field. Ahasuerus 21:09, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Doctor Who title problem.

Re: Introducing Doctor Who & Introduction (Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster)
These two Introductions are identical. I have all 10 novels of the Pinnacle series. All 10 use the exact same introduction word for word by Harlen Ellison. I need to somehow replace the Introduction (Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster) with Introducing Doctor Who in my cloned Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster. I'm not sure how to do that. Of course I need to wait until my clone is approved before I do anything.--Astromath 20:20, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Remove the title from the publication record using the "Remove Title..." function. Then add a new content using the "Edit This Pub" function. You'll need to merge the new title with any current db title record with the exact name, and then variant it if necessary with any title that is the same text but with a different name. 21:04, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
Even better. Since yours is probably no different than any of introductions in the non-verified editions of the same publication, I'm going to edit the title record and then merge it with the matching record. Mhhutchins 21:07, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
Done. Mhhutchins 21:10, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
Thx!!!--Astromath 22:45, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Space Cougar!

I have a question. I have the sixth issue of The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction and in it there is the story Space Cougar! and it is listed as by S. Hutson Blount, Peter V. Brett, Erin Casher, Spike Marlowe, Alan DeNiro, Gordon van Gelder, Jay Lake, Nick Mamatas, Carlton Mellick III, E. C. Myers, Devin Poore, Christopher Reynaga, Ken Scholes, John Skipp, Peter Straub, Michael Swanwick, and Jackson Juiceely. This is not a round-robin story. In an accompaning article Spike Marlowe and Christopher Reynaga mention that "The story traveled from one drunken con party to the next where the young turks and established giants of fiction furiously added a line or two . . . " I know that this is a dumb question, and I know the probable answer, but when I list this story, do I also list all of these authors? Is there any protocal for a story with this many authors? I suspect this is a joke story, but . . .

I needed to ask before I listed it and the contents of this magazine. MLB 11:13, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

If it took that many people to write it, it is a joke...but no one of the authors should be let off the hook. They should equally share blame credit in the ISFDB record. Mhhutchins 16:06, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
As I have been commanded, so shall I do. MLB 07:55, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
See also Atlanta Nights for how a big bunch of SF authors perpetrated a well-known 'travesty'. Strictly a 'no more than one chapter at a time' book... :-/ PeteYoung 03:49, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Decision at Doona cover upload

Request to delete the following: Decision at Doona image
I accidentally uploaded the image to the wrong pub. It belongs to the recently cloned pub. Will reupload image to correct pub when approved.--Astromath 14:02, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Done. Thanks for letting us know. -- JLaTondre (talk) 14:35, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

NONGENRE vs. other types

This series is non-genre, and has that in the title of the series. I was going to change the types to NONGENRE and then realized that that would lose information -- some of these are chapbooks, some are collections, and so on. What's the appropriate way to handle this? Does the use of NONGENRE always imply NOVEL? Mike Christie (talk) 02:07, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Here, just as we're talking about in another current discussion, someone has used the series function for a purpose it wasn't designed for. NONGENRE is always for a nongenre novel. We don't have a type for nongenre stories, nongenre anthologies, or, as you've seen here, for nongenre collections. So some enterprising soul has decided this is the next best thing. And it's hard to argue with the results. At least it keeps Brown's sf collections separate from his nongenre collections. The name of the series should at least be "Fredric Brown's Nongenre Story Collections" or something less generic than it is now. :) Mhhutchins 02:18, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
OK. Would it make sense to change it to a checkbox? It can be an attribute of any fiction, after all, though it would be irrelevant for essays and introductions and so on. I suppose it could be used for reviews. Mike Christie (talk) 02:28, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
I'm not a software designer, but I can't imagine it would be as simple as that. There had already been a discussion about creating other types of nongenre publications, but I don't think there's been any progress on it because of the current shortage of developers. And I don't believe it's high on their list of priorities. Mhhutchins 02:38, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
There is a feature request to add support for non-genre collections etc. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as adding a checkbox. Ahasuerus 03:05, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Ballard/Four-Dimensional Nightmare & Voices of Time

Ballard's 1963 Gollancz collection The Four-Dimensional Nightmare was revised (as noted on that page) in 1974. Gollancz then reissued the revised version in 1985 under the title The Voices of Time. Is there anything that can be done to connect these two titles? I was going to make the latter a variant of the former, but if I understand the rules correctly it's not strictly a variant because the first edition of the former title has different contents. However, the SFE3 entry on Ballard regards it as a variant title. What, if anything, can I do to connect these? Mike Christie (talk) 18:23, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

The 1984 edition of The Voices of Time is identical to the 1974 version of The Four-Dimensional Nightmare, which is sufficient reason to make it into a variant. I've done that. Thanks. Mhhutchins 04:07, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Art attributed to Bok not by Bok

Hello!

On the page for Startling Stories, January 1948 -- http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?60669 -- someone has written:

"Interior art for "The Blue Flamingo" is not signed, but in Bok's style."

Actually, the style does not at all resemble Bok's. Instead of his usual stylized anatomy, the figurework on display here is more "realistic," and instead of his usual stippling, the technique used here is cross-hatching and contour lines.

If anything, the style resembles the work of a well-known contributor to Startling Stories: Lawrence Sterne Stevens.

MarkFuller 02:00, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

This would have been better posted on the page of the editor who did a Primary Verification of the record. I'll leave him a note to join in the discussion. Thanks. Mhhutchins 03:29, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
I'm not in the habit of attributing artwork by style, so I don't think I made the Bok attribution, but I'll change the entries.--Rkihara 07:58, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Canada and Chaosium

This question arose from trying to enter The Spiraling Worm by David Conyers and John Sunseri. My copy has a price of $15.95 whereas the existing record has a price from Locus1 of $14.95. Ordinarily, I would assume that Locus is mistaken and note it. However, my copy also states that it was printed in Canada. I've been collecting a number of books in the Chaosium Cthulhu Mythos series ([4], [5] and [6]) and nearly half of the ones I've purchased are printed in Canada. I had always assumed that Chaosium printed wherever was most economical and that the books were all US editions as Chaosium is a US company. The difference in price is causing me to question that assumption. Though I would also find it hard to believe that nearly 50% of the books I've bought in the US secondary market are Canadian editions. I'm thinking I've probably got a US edition. Do folks agree? As an aside, and probably more of a R&S discussion. This book feels more like a collection. There is no editor and all the stories are by one or the other or both authors. Technically an anthology by our rules, but it may be worthy of an exception. Thanks. --Ron ~ RtraceTalk 20:40, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Please help fixing some dupes

I have checked that they are all real dupes 

E. Tickner-Edwards  19694
E. Ticknor-Edwardes 132936
=> Corrected.Hauck 18:05, 6 February 2013 (UTC) 
David Gerold	64761
David Gerrold	106
=> Corrected.Hauck 18:05, 6 February 2013 (UTC) 
James de Mille	108486
James DeMille	140121
=> Corrected.Hauck 18:05, 6 February 2013 (UTC) 
Janny Wurts	433
Jenny Wurts	158542
=> Perhaps needs primary verification (author is given as Jenny in Locus).Hauck 18:05, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
At their listing of the issue of Odyssey that contains that story, Locus credits "Jenny Wurts". But if you click on her name there, it takes you to the listing by "Janny Wurts", and her bibliography there includes this story. So it's pretty clear that they are the same person. Amazon.UK lists the author as "Janny", and I doubt they will have corrected a typo in the ToC, so I think this is just a Locus error. I'm changing the author's name on the story, with a note that it might be listed under the misspelling. Chavey 02:49, 17 February 2013 (UTC) 
Joesepha Sherman 133177
Josepha Sherman 1605
=> Corrected.Hauck 18:05, 6 February 2013 (UTC) 
Keith Harman	32241
Keith Hartman	6786
=> Has the tp under Harman ever been published ? Hauck 18:05, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
Short story of the same name was published (and PVed) as by "Hartman". I could find no record of a novel-length version. It may have been scheduled before Meisha Merlin's demise. I say delete it and the name will disappear. Mhhutchins 21:12, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
Deleted. Hauck 07:21, 7 February 2013 (UTC) 
Michael Shaara	1260
Michale Shaara	158114
=> Corrected. Hauck 18:05, 6 February 2013 (UTC) 
Nina Allan	51961
Nina Allen	147347
=> Corrected. Hauck 18:05, 6 February 2013 (UTC) 
Norbert Weiner	131922
Norbert Wiener	19783
=> Corrected.Hauck 18:05, 6 February 2013 (UTC) 
Thomas Harlan	6421
Thomas Harland	112246
Corrected. Hauck 18:28, 6 February 2013 (UTC) 
Walter Van Tilburg Clark 15219
Walter Von Tilburg Clark 117812
=> Corrected. Hauck 18:33, 6 February 2013 (UTC) 
Jane Rice 2209
Lane Rice 156612
=> Corrected. Hauck 18:33, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Regards, Qshadow 16:12, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Hauck. Who is PV? The 132936 still exists please remove it. Qshadow 19:07, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
Swfritter & Don Erikson are PVs, #132936 should have disappeared. Hauck 19:22, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Dupes - Part 2

I checked all of them and they are dupes with almost 100% certainty. 

Hendrik Dahl Juve	1774
Henrik Dahl Juve	18555
=> Aligned to Henrik but with reservations. Hauck 15:51, 8 February 2013 (UTC) 
Lee Owen	18673
Lee Owens	19160
=> Owens's been made a pseudonym of Owen by rule of majority. Hauck 14:50, 12 February 2013 (UTC) 
Patricia Matthews	2459
Patricia Shaw Mathews	13910
Patricia Shaw Matthews	20772
=> Corrected for the last couple, not sure for the first name. Hauck 16:02, 8 February 2013 (UTC) 
Rick Shelley	1695
Rick Shelly	11557
=> Corrected, with in some cases 4PV (including me) badly in need of a new pair of glasses ;-). Hauck 09:10, 8 February 2013 (UTC) 
Jacqueline Seewald	120284
Jaqueline Seewald	45241
=> Corrected to Jacqueline (no hits for Jaqueline). Hauck 16:05, 8 February 2013 (UTC) 
John Brody	14875
John Brudy	17454
=> IMHO, evidence is not conclusive, I confirm Brody in NW and Brudy in Amazing (see there. Hauck 10:49, 8 February 2013 (UTC) 
John Elliot	2305
John Elliott	111246
=> IMHO, it's two different authors, but the short story _The Blood Goes Round_ is perhaps by Elliot. Hauck 16:09, 8 February 2013 (UTC) 
Katherine Paterson	7417
Katherine Patterson	43551
=> Aligned to Paterson, no PV. Hauck 14:40, 10 February 2013 (UTC) 
Kay Leigh	112046
Kay Leith	112165
=> Aligned to Leith, no PV. Hauck 14:38, 10 February 2013 (UTC) 
Lorin Emery	15546
Loring Emery	11976
=> Pseudonym. Hauck 14:35, 10 February 2013 (UTC) 
Tom La Farge	5442
Tom Lafarge	5441
=> Aligned to Lafarge. Hauck 14:33, 10 February 2013 (UTC) 
Victoria Elisabeth Garcia	46101
Victoria Elizabeth Garcia	126182
=> Aligned to Elisabeth on majority grounds, no PV. Hauck 14:30, 10 February 2013 (UTC) 
Gary McMahan	158839
Gary McMahon	113807
=> Corrected. Hauck 14:25, 10 February 2013 (UTC) 
Geoffrey Malone	125594
Geoffrey Maloney	3242
=> Corrected. Hauck 14:21, 10 February 2013 (UTC) 
Jim C. Himes	20840
Jim C. Hines	31084
=> Corrected. Hauck 14:17, 10 February 2013 (UTC) 
John B. Roseman	147522
John B. Rosenman	12814
=> Corrected (no PV for single item). Hauck 14:15, 10 February 2013 (UTC) 
Keith Brooke	1556
Keith Brooks	12911
=> PV asked. Hauck 14:12, 10 February 2013 (UTC) 
Lilian Stewart Carl	148158
Lillian Stewart Carl	4149
=> Corrected (my mistake). Hauck 14:05, 10 February 2013 (UTC) 
Mel Odom	2749
Mel Odum	121322
=> Corrected. Hauck 09:16, 8 February 2013 (UTC) 
Neal Schusterman	82265
Neal Shusterman	4721
=> Corrected. Hauck 14:01, 10 February 2013 (UTC) 
Robert W. Krepps	1862
Robert W. Kreps	13047
=> Pseudonym made (as per Locus1). Hauck 09:19, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

I will update our dup project as soon as we finish with this one. Thanks, Qshadow 16:47, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Uploaidng cover scans

(copying the question to the Help Desk)

I've been trying to upload a scan for Great Cities of the Ancient World from Doubleday. The problem is that someone loaded the cover scan for the Dorset Press version of this book into the location for the Doubleday version. At my request, Michael Hutchins (as moderator for the DD pub edit) removed that scan. When I tried to upload my scan of the Doubleday pub, the Dorset scan was apparently reloaded instead. The Dorset pub still shows the DD scan location. I'm baffled. What do I have to do to get the correct scan uploaded without screwing up the Dorset scan? Bob 15:29, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Both editions should have the right image now (please check). The only problem was, that the Dorset edition referred to the image of the Doubleday edition. --Willem H. 19:39, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
Finally! Thank you for the help, Willem. Bob 20:05, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
This is a common problem with replacing image files. The user must clear his cache or he will see the original image. After I deleted the image for the Dorset cover, the image file that Bob loaded of the Doubleday cover took over the name of the original file (so that it would match with the Doubleday record's tag). The file with that Dorset image remained in Bob's cache so it appeared when his browser called up that file name. Once the cache is cleared the correct Doubleday image would have appeared. If this happens in the future hit the F5 key and the newly uploaded image will appear. (Some browsers use different function keys. Refer to your browser help.) Mhhutchins 20:31, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

2001 a space odyssey edition question

I have in my collection a Fourth Printing - November, 1969. I cannot find any information anywhere regarding the later printings. It differs greatly from the NAL first edition. My copy doesn't have the picture end papers, they are blank pages. My copy also has World Publishing with a red tree logo on spine and on dust jacket. I have never come across another one like it.Do I have an actual later printing of this first trade edition? Here's link to pictures on my book LinkSpanishMill 00:18, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Whoa, never saw anything like this one. I'm not sure what connection NAL has with World, but it may have been some sort of special/book club printing. I really can't say. What is the publisher stated at the bottom of the title page? Does it have just the NAL logo with "The New American Library" printed below it? Regardless, you should create a database record for it. Use the "Clone This Pub" link from the record for the first edition. Just make the necessary changes to have it reflect your copy. Mhhutchins 01:18, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
A little research has shown that this association between NAL and World existed for a least a few years in the later 1960s, although we currently have no records in the database that represent this association. So this probably was as stated: the fourth printing of the NAL edition. Mhhutchins 01:25, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
Further research shows that every title I could find under this publishing venture were hardcovers, so it's possible that New American Library, which began as a paperback publisher, had to use this association with World Publishing to put out their hardcover editions. I only have the book club edition of 2001 and there is no mention of World Publishing at all. Mhhutchins 01:35, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
I also have a BCE edition and its completely different than my World copy. I've always thought it was strange because even the BCE's have the photo end papers (in all blue) and my World copy has blank pages and blank inside boards instead. I will take a close look at it tonight. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by SpanishMill (talk • contribs) .

Foundation's Edge gutter code question

I have in my collection this book Link Which indicates a gutter code "M36" for the first edition. My actual copy has a gutter code of "M39". What is the difference? Is my copy a second printing in the same month? This is a link to pictures of my copyMyLinkSpanishMill 01:14, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Doubleday usually drops the "First Edition" statement after the first printing, and never designates the printing number of later printings. Your copy is an unusual case, i.e. a later printing of that still carries the "First Edition" statement. No one who knows that there was an earlier printing could know that this copy is not the true first edition. You can create an ISFDB record for your printing by cloning the first edition record and making the appropriate changes to reflect your copy. Mhhutchins 01:38, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
Yes, I thought I read that before about DD dropping the FE statement after the first printing. I sure can pick'em!SpanishMill 02:03, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Misha Nogha & Leah Cutter dups

Misha Nogha 

10429 Mischa
1938 Misha
=> Corrected (also done the Misha Nogha titles). Hauck 18:32, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Leah Cutter 

73851 Leah Cutter
7223 Leah R. Cutter
=> Pseudonym made.Hauck 18:35, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, a lot Hauck!

Qshadow 18:46, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Richard A. Lovett

First one is an error 

51571 Robert A. Lovett
21572 Richard A. Lovett
=> Corrected. Hauck 21:05, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
Thanks!

Qshadow 20:44, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

The Ultimate Invader and Other Science-Fiction

I recently got this book in the mail from a used book dealer, and while I'm verifying it (I'm number five in the queue) I think by ISFDB rules this book is mis-listed. This book is listed on this site as The Ultimate Invader and Other Science-Fiction edited by Donald A. Wollheim, but this is the title only on the book’s cover, but the title page lists this book as The Ultimate Invader and Other Science-Fiction Stories From the Four Corners of Time edited by Donald A. Wollheim. Which is the right title? Isn’t the title that is on the title page the one that should be used? MLB 13:18, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

You're correct. It is the ISFDB standard that publication records should give the title on the book's title page. Leave a note about this situation on the talk pages of the three active primary verifiers. (Linking to the publication record helps.) Mhhutchins 17:46, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

some more Dups 

Steve Proposch	15718
Steven Proposch	81709
Stephen Proposch	23414
Dupes see: www.locusmag.com/index/s540.htm
=> Made two pseudonyms of Steven (as per Locus and majority), asked the only PV. Hauck 09:15, 19 February 2013 (UTC) 
Bruce Bough	30392 (Should be PS)
Bruce Baugh	17827
=> Likely but I've found no strong evidence. Hauck 09:25, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
Both of them wrote stories for “Clan Novels” based on the “Vampire: the Masquerade”, see here for Bough and see our Baugh page for the rest of his Clan Novels. I also send Baugh an email to https://plus.google.com/107122403431806926287/about Qshadow 12:12, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
I just got a reply from Baugh: "Hi there. Yes, both of those are me. Entry 30392 mispells my name; those two entries are short stories that were in White Wolf anthologies for Vampire: The Masquerade." Qshadow 12:07, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
Now corrected. Hauck 15:10, 20 February 2013 (UTC) 
Bill Wesley	17721 OK
Bill Westley	83901 Marked as ERR in Project page  but still not fixed
=> Corrected. Hauck 09:35, 19 February 2013 (UTC) 
Vittorio Cantani	146990 See http://www.catalogovegetti.com/catalogo/_Catani.htm
Vittorio Catani	126777
=> Corrected (my mistake). Hauck 09:43, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

Regards, Qshadow 22:12, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

Asimov's Triangle

So, in this case which version holds more prestige value to a collector? The BCE or Trade? Asimov's TriangleSpanishMill 17:52, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

This might have been better posted on the ISFDB:Community_Portal. This page is intended to provide Help about creating and updating records in the database. There's not much discussion about "value" on the ISFDB. Not that it's forbidden, but that the subject is not one of our concerns. Personally, I would think that the book club edition would have more value. Regardless of the stated publication date, both editions were printed the same week, on the same press. Since they're identical except for the lack of a printed price on the dustjacket, and the dropping of the "First Edition" statement from the copyright page, you'd have to figure the one with the least copies would be of more value. Of course, that would depend upon the condition of the book as well. But the ultimate judge of "value" is how much someone is willing to pay for it. Dealers on Abebooks are selling copies for as low as $15.00 (unjacketed) to $225.00 (pristine), and most of them are book club editions (at least those dealers who admit it in their listing.) Mhhutchins 18:45, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, I'll post these kinds of questions on the community portal in the future. Seems like the Trade, BCE, and Canadian editions are identical other than as you mentioned the price on the DJ. Abebooks sellers hardly ever put enough details in their descriptions and even less answer questions about their books. I'm currently talking to a guy who I'm trying to buy the Canadian version from and although the ISFDB section doesn't say.... the gutter codes is also C13.SpanishMill 18:58, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

Editing publication tags

Now that we can't do it manually, how do we correct the problem when two records have identical tags? Rtrace, do you recall the sequence of submissions in creating these two records? I can't figure out how the system assigned the same tag to two different records. Mhhutchins 19:29, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

I recall that I added the one marked 2nd impression first and then cloned it for the first printing, but I'm not 100% certain of the sequence and the recent integrations don't bear our my memory. --Ron ~ RtraceTalk 19:47, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
Interesting. Let me examine the submission table... Ahasuerus 00:53, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
Well, that didn't work. Publication tags are created at approval time, so they are not present in submissions. I guess I will have to change one of the tags to a unique value manually. Give me a few minutes. Ahasuerus 01:59, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
Done. What's interesting is that the two pubs have sequential publication numbers, so they were created one after the other. Ahasuerus 02:21, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
It seems that's a cleanup script we'll still need. :-/ I have no definite ideas about how it occurred - since I squashed the bugs that led to multiple "DCTRWHNDTH" tags for Doctor Who books published in the same year, it should be nearly impossible (millions to one against) to have duplicates created. One question - how far apart time-wise were these created? I suspect our lack of proper transactions may allow two rapid approvals to independently generate the same tag. Unfortunately, if that's the answer, the solution is going to be very difficult. BLongley 08:20, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Reviews of periodicals

Today I spotted Michael's recent comment on Chavey's talk page, stating that reviews of periodicals should be entered as ESSAYS, "as the ISFDB currently has no other way to handle reviews of periodicals". I wasn't aware of this, and earlier this month indexed SF Commentary #82, which contains several fanzine reviews. They display fine, and the reviews also display fine for the reviewed titles (eg.). Everything appears to be OK, so does this cause software issues? Or anything else that I/we need to know about? PeteYoung 01:09, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

If the problem is that the review is therefore displayed on a page with several title entries with the reviewed title unspecified (eg.), I may have just answered my own question. PeteYoung 01:22, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
Yes, that's the drawback of merging editor records. In essence, a MAGAZINE/FANZINE-typed record's title reference (or title record) is an EDITOR record. These editor records are generated by the system at the time of the record's creation. One editor record per publication record. Someone felt too many of these editor records were cluttering some of the more popular editors' summary pages. (Imagine 30 plus years of monthly magazines listed on John W. Campbell's author page.) So he came up with the solution of merging them into annual records. Which is OK, except for one reason: the magazine publication records no longer have a single title reference for you to link reviews to. A way around this dilemma is to link reviews to publications, not titles. But that causes more problems than it solves. (This is not feasible under the current software.) So we're left with this slightly awkward situation on how to deal with linking reviews to the titles they review. In the relatively few cases where the editor records haven't been merged there's no problem. Otherwise, your options are: 1) link the review to the merged annual record that includes the individual issue being reviewed, 2) leave the review record unlinked, or 3) change the review to an ESSAY. None of the three are ideal. Mhhutchins 01:43, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
Yes, this is a perfect example of us shooting our own feet. The problem was long pages: the "solution" has led to these problems. Worse still, people now routinely merge Editor records by Year even when the page isn't too long. :-( And it does nothing to solve other lengthy problems like Asimov's Essays. A better solution to the original problem might be to display the first 10 or 20 titles with a 'MORE' button to expand that section if required. I guess one excuse for not having done that is that the workaround predates opening up the software development process to other people. It's still possible to do that, but reworking the already merged EDITOR records would require a lot of rework: the Unmerge part is already available, but it wouldn't put the correct date back on the unmerged records. And if we've added to the workarounds with Michael's option 1, link to the Annual record, we'd have no way of knowing what the link should be after the Unmerge. I think option 3 might be best if nobody volunteers for all the rework, but would recommend a new naming standard for the reviews: see "Barbed Wire Kisses" (the name of the column) where the issues reviewed are included in the title of the essay. BLongley 05:42, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
P.S. I was also going to cite Nick Lowe's "Mutant Popcorn" columns, but either my memory is faulty or somebody has standardised the names and lost the details of the films being reviewed. I know it's pushing the boundaries, but someone might well desire to list the film reviews, especially as they could presumably all be linked to an IMDB entry. Again, massive rework required though. BLongley 05:58, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
Probably me, but IIRC the data about the films reviewed can sometimes be found in the publication itself like here. Hervé Hauck 08:44, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
It could be argued that the list of films reviewed should be on the Column title record, if separate Reviews or Essays aren't going to be entered. But as I have no intention on doing the work, I'm not going to start a Rules and Standards discussion over it. BLongley 12:18, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
Yes, it's logical to find the data at this level. IMHO it's overkill, but if someone wants to do this, no problem. Hauck 12:38, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
BTW, in the case referenced here I would have suggested to Chavey that he link the review record to the annual editor record, but from the title of the review, there was no way of knowing which year, much less which issue, was being reviewed. Mhhutchins 01:47, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
Well, the author of that review words the review as if he were writing about general issues affecting the entire journal, i.e. he means to be reviewing the journal "in total". His examples all come from the Dec. 1976 issue of Extrapolation, so we could view it as a review of that issue, or of that year. But it seems clear that the author views it as a review of the journal itself. Chavey 23:44, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

The Green Trap by Ben Bova

Can somebody check the hardcover of The Green Trap by Ben Bova? I have the paperback and the cover art is credited to Don Farrell (Don Farrell/Getty Images) but the cover artist of the paperback is credited to Jamie Stafford-Hill and verifier Sjmathis states in their notes that they got their information on the cover artist from the hardcover. Is it possible that Jamie Stafford-Hill just designed the cover? MLB 13:36, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

A search in the Amazon look-inside shows "Jacket design by Jamie Stafford-Hill / Jacket photograph by Don Farrall/Getty Images". The cover appears to be a montage of photographs, so I would credit the designer in this case. There's nothing definite that I'm aware of in the standards about how to handle cases like this. I personally don't like to enter multiple credits unless they're collaborative, and here it's the designer who created the final cover image. Of course everyone should be credited in the Note field. Again, it's a personal thing. Mhhutchins 16:07, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
Okay, just asking. Now I know. MLB 06:41, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

Which way canonical?

Looking for canonical name for this person: 127335, 126915, and 181985. Any suggestions? Thank you! ForJohnScalzi 06:11, 27 February 2013 (UTC).

I'd go with Djibril Alayad, because it was used for editor credit. Mhhutchins 06:38, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
Logical. But he seems to be using the last one for editorial as well more recently and it's also what he uses in TFF blog. Thank you. ForJohnScalzi 06:52, 27 February 2013 (UTC).

Dating of excerpts

Help is not very precise on the excerpts, in my opinion. So I have a couple of questions. 1. Is it the date of first publication of the whole work? or the date of the first publication of the excerpt? 2. I have also found this "series". Is that the established practice? For example, it would be user-friendly to have all excerpts from 1557632 in one place, but I'm not sure the current definition of "series" allows it. In fact, this case is special because the original work, albeit always referred to as NOVEL, is more a collection or fix-up. Thank you! ForJohnScalzi 06:24, 27 February 2013 (UTC).

  1. I believe it should be the date of the whole work's publication. Other editors may feel differently.
  2. That use of the series function is unusual. (And where is the title record for the work from which they're excerpted? Strange.) It's just an editor's method of grouping titles. But I see no problem with it. Other editors may feel differently.
I don't see any excerpts on the author's page. Is it the stories in the "Tort the Shell-man" series? If so, you can place the novel in the same series. There have been other series created to include the stories that made up a fix-up novel, and that is a legitimate use of the function: To Open the Sky and Roma Eterna are two fix-ups by the same author.
I personally feel differently about how true excerpts should be handled (i.e., not stories that were previously published and became part of a fix-up novel, but promotional pieces published in the backs of paperbacks as filler materal). I don't like seeing them placed into a series, like this. Other editors may feel differently. Mhhutchins 07:11, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
Thank you! About Tutuola, these 3 titles: 95671, 1439585, and 1556365 are excerpts from 1557632.
Yes, it would be good to have rules for different treatment of excerpts and promo excerpts. ForJohnScalzi 03:07, 28 February 2013 (UTC).
Is the title (parentheses and all) as given for this record exactly how it appears on its title page? Also, as I responded to your inquiry about creating a series for these titles, feel free to proceed. Mhhutchins 04:34, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
I don't have a copy of "Weird" (hmm, probably should), need to ask PV. Will proceed with the series, thank you. ForJohnScalzi 05:18, 28 February 2013 (UTC).

Editing book data listings

I just joined as an editor in order to correct the number of pages of Moorcock's "The Silver Warriors" in one edition. I am taking it from the book. It reads 20 & should read 220. How do I do it? Thanks for helping a neophyte. Contact Mike Emery at hifrommike65@hotmail.com

Hello, Mike! Well just go the publication record, (here), and then go down at the left tool bar until you find the major bar 'Editing Tools'. One of the tools is the 'Edit This Pub' tool. You enter the editing by clicking on that specific tool. Now all you have to do is to change the page count from 20 to 220 and submit. One or the other moderator will gladly approve of your submission thereafter.
You have to login first at the top left of any page of ISFBD, though.
And if you have that particular book/publication you may want to primary verify it (the last tool of 'Editing Tools' when you are on the publication level).
Hope to have been of some help. Stonecreek 11:26, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

Oddity For Collection Title

In the publication "Island of Fear and Other Science Fiction (Stories)" by William Sambrot, I've noticed an oddity. Normally with a collection, you will see the title of the collection heading pages 1, 3, 5, etc., and the title of the individual story you're reading heading pages 2, 4, 6, etc. With this specific publication, I've noticed that the even pages are headed with the story you are on, and instead of "Island of Fear and Others" (or similar) heading the odd pages, it says "Space Secrets". My idea is that perhaps this collection was going to be named "Space Secrets and Other Stories" or something similar, but this is conjecture on my part. In any case, it seems to be a mistake on the publisher's part. Is this information worth adding to the Bibliographic Comments? Should it be submitted in a different section? Is it simply too insignificant to mention, or perhaps too hard to verify in any way, whether a mistake or not? Biggewarner 02:08, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

It's better to add such an oddity to the Note field of the publication record, rather than create a Bibliographic Comments page. The former is visible to all users, while the latter is only available as a link from the database to the wiki. If you've had a chance to look at more than a few Primary Verified records, you'll find all kind of details given in the Note field (depending upon the editor's penchant for detail.) So no one is going to prohibit you from adding information that deals specifically with this publication. Keep in mind: some data is title-related and should be added to the title record. In this case, the data you want to add is publication-related. Because this is a Primary Verified record, you should leave a message on the verifying editor's talk page to discuss adding this data. Mhhutchins 03:48, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

From Pole to Pole

As I am typing this I am entering From Pole to Pole to the databank from the anthology The Monster-Maker and Other Science Fiction Classics as edited by Michael Kelahan. There is no link yet, the entry is in creation. However, on the story's title page the story is listed as From Pole to Pole: An Account of a Journey Through the Axis of the Earth; Collated from the Diaries of the Late Professor Haffkin and His Niece, Mrs. Arthur Princeps by George Griffiths. Whew. This story has been listed here as having been reprinted numerous times on this site, but this is the first time that I've seen this long title. I understand the last part is a sub-title, but should I put it in the listing, or mention it in the Note field? And is this the way that it was printed in October 1904 issue of The Windsor Magazine? I have other reprintings of this story, and none of them have the entire sub-title. MLB 09:34, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

Follow the ISFDB standard of entering the title as given on the story's title page, including the subtitle. Then make it into a variant of the current canonical title. If any of the other printings turn out to have the same subtitle, they can always be unmerged from the current title and merged with this one. There are five primary verified records so leaving a note on the verifying editor's talk page would be a good idea. (Not every editor pays attention to this page.) Mhhutchins 18:29, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures

I have The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures and it is filled with stories that are sequels to many of Jules Verne's novels. I was wondering if I should make these stories part of a series such as (series/other). I would put the series name in and then later link it to its parent, while I would leave "other" so that this subseries could be used to group other stories in the same series by other authors in different publications. Or, I could just get a life. Whatever. MLB 10:26, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

This is how it's done in many cases: you take the original series *X" and make it into a subseries of "X Universe". Then create a new series for the spin-offs, say "X Spin-offs" (or whatever), and make it a subseries of "X Universe". The trouble with Verne though is that most of his titles are already part of a "universe" series: Voyages Extraordinaires If any of the stories are set in the worlds of these novels (and most of them probably are), you'd have to first make each novel of Verne's universe into its own series, which frankly wouldn't display very well on Verne's summary page, and wouldn't make sense for the average user. Of course, you could always just note the original novel that "inspired" the story, and link it (using HTML) in the individual story's title record. Looking at this publication, I can see that only two stories have been linked to the author's original series. Personally, I don't like seeing stories "by divers hands" entered as part of the original series, and should have a separate subseries. Mhhutchins 18:47, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
"Voyages Extraordinaires" was really a publication series rather than a title series, we just haven't converted it yet. Ahasuerus 20:24, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
And that can only be done when there are records in the database for the publications by the publisher (Pierre-Jules Hetzel) who designated this series and its numbering. Of course, the title records could just be cleared of series data and we could leave the publication series to the editor who creates records for the original publications. Mhhutchins 20:41, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

Mismatch between Type and Storylen

Is it normal for a title to have Type=Novel and Storylen=shortstory? For example: The Blue Star by Fletcher Pratt. Qshadow 19:31, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

NOVEL type records should have no story length. Some users have used the field to indicate juvenile titles ("jvn") and novelizations ("nvz"), but otherwise it should be blank. I'll correct the record, If you see any other such mismatches just update the title record. Mhhutchins 19:36, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
There's some odd ones out there. I just corrected a storylen of '1984-00-00'! We could enforce a length of "jvn", "nvz" or null if people desire it. BLongley 21:00, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

ESSAY with story length "shortfiction"

An advanced search shows that there are more than 500 titles in the database which are typed as ESSAY but have a storylength of "sf" (displayed as "shortfiction"). I suppose this happened when a record is first created as SHORTFICTION and then somewhere along the way it gets changed to ESSAY. Is there a way to remove the storylength when a submission updates the type of a record? Mhhutchins 20:11, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

This will be done if the author remembers to clear the storylen field when converting to ESSAY. Given the number of titles where this has obviously not been done, enforcing a null storylen on ESSAY records would be a desirable Feature Request. BTW, there's nearly 700 when you also look for ss, nt, nv and "None". BLongley 20:50, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
With this number then it's obvious editors must not be doing it, and moderators aren't catching it. That's why it would be nice for it to be done by the system. Mhhutchins 21:09, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
OK. Should we flag it up as a warning on the mod screen, autocorrect it, or both? BLongley 21:49, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
Yes, it's a known problem. The problem with autocorrecting these mismatches would be that we can't be 100% sure whether the value of the "type" field is correct or whether the value of the "storylen" field is correct. My guess would be that in 90%+ of all cases the value of the "type" field is right and the value of the "storylen" field is wrong, but for POEMs the ratio is closer to 70-30, at least based on my experience. Ahasuerus 22:33, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
If the storylen field was automatically cleared, in the submission, when an editor submitted an edit to change the shortfiction title to another type, then the moderator would either approve both changes or reject both changes at once. If the editor is messing up changing the type, then it should be rejected anyhow. Unless I'm misreading what BLongley means by autocorrect, I cannot think of a case where doing such would cause a problem and would avoid extra edits after the fact to clean things up. -- JLaTondre (talk) 23:27, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
Perhaps we are talking about somewhat different scenarios. Suppose an editor pulls up a pub in Edit Pub (or Clone Pub) and adds a title record. He enters the new title as an ESSAY and sets its "Length" value to "sf". What would you suggest the software should do in this case? Ideally, the user interface would display an error message and prevent the user from submitting the form, but the current JavaScript validation logic is a mess and needs to be rewritten (which I have already discussed with Al) before we ask it to do more. Ahasuerus 01:03, 8 March 2013 (UTC)
Set it to essay and clear the length; plus add a message notifying the user as part of the submission accepted page. Unless the error handling is re-written to re-display the form with all the data the user entered, please avoid adding as many rejects as you can. It is very irritating to loose a bunch of work because of a stupid mistake. -- JLaTondre (talk) 03:09, 8 March 2013 (UTC)
I was referring to the JavaScript validation that is currently active in the Edit Title form. It prevents you from submitting non-integer series numbers, invalid years, etc. We need to add similar validation logic to other forms, but first we need to rewrite the code because the current stuff is needlessly complicated and very difficult to understand, much less expand. Once we improve it, we can make it catch inconsistencies like the one outlined above.
For now, I recommend using Firefox for all submissions because Firefox remembers the state of the form when you click on "Submit" and will recreate it verbatim if you later click on the "Go back" arrow. Chrome doesn't keep track of dynamically added fields (or didn't as of a few weeks ago), so you can lose a lot of stuff. IE was even worse when I last checked its behavior, but I generally don't use it. Ahasuerus 04:08, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

Is there a way to clean these 500+ records without having to do it manually? Mhhutchins 20:11, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it's easily scriptable. 
update titles
set title_storylen = NULL
where title_ttype = 'ESSAY'
and title_storylen is not null
Not sure if this is a Bug or an FR. BLongley 20:50, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
And there are more than 300 INTERIORART records with storylen "sf", along with almost 200 POEM records. Mhhutchins 21:20, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
There were a few NONFICTION as well, which I'm fixing manually. But this brings up another question: can you locate all of the NONFICTION titles which are "contained" in MAGAZINE, NOVEL, COLLECTION, and ANTHOLOGY records? Mhhutchins 21:23, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
Yes. Have a look at these: 
id     title
102887	H. G. Wells: Critic of Progress
874389	An Unsolved Mystery
875041	Parson Rudall's Ghost
875042	The Powers of Darkness
875043	Only the Dreamers Die
875044	Behold This Dreamer
875045	The Renishaw Coffin
875046	The Hand on The Wheel
875047	The Witch of Tucks Wood
875048	The Mystery of the Seven Hunters
875049	The Curse Over Chung Ling Soo
875050	The Cold Phantom of Kemp Town
875051	The Obstinate Phantom of Calverley Hall
875052	The Strange Mystery of Julia Sheward
875053	The Demon Mummy Case
875054	Fitzalan's Dog
875055	The Wicked Lord and the Veiled Phantom
875056	The Nameless Horror of Berkley Square
888594	The Ghost at the Old Ford
983414	Exorcism in a Convent
983422	The Original Black Mass
983423	Satan and Dr. Janet
983426	The Amherst Mystery
1028928 Epilogue: Echoes and Shadows: A Brief Enquiry
1072560 The Man in White
1080292 The Flatwoods Monster
1091805 The Amazing Laser
1127487 Knights of Takhisis
1191924 Avant-Propos (Aventures Lointaines Numéro 02)
1194058 Dedication: Elinor McKay
1244982 The Grey Piper and the Heavy Coach of Donaldgowerie House, Perth
1244983 The House of the Ghostly Tap-Dancing
1290358 Above It All
1346076 Mère Maxim
1359016 Some Authenticated Ghost Stories
1359714 Book of Sith: Secrets from the Dark Side
1362401 Three Strange Stories
1367064 A Memory of My Own
1367065 The Ghosts of Rathgar
1367066 An Irish Link With Tutankhamun
1367068 A Person Imprisoned in the Past
1367069 Lord Mountnugent's Battle with the Devil
1367070 Ghostly Monks
1367073 A Rector Comes Back
1367074 A Dreadful Experience
1367075 Banshee
1371311 Black Magic
1377177 The Dragon's Rock
1377178 The Terrible-Tempered Dragon
1378079 The Whistling Ghosts
1378081 A Phantom of the Seas
1380797 The Way Of Ghosts
1384538 Prodigious Noise of War and Battle
1384594 Irish Superstitions
1384595 Rathlin Island
1384596 Death Signs
1384597 A Terrible Revenge
1384598 The Hartpole Doom
1384599 November Eve
1384600 Sliabh-Mish, County Kerry
1384601 A Woman's Curse
1384602 Loch Foyle
1384603 A Wicked Spell
1384604 The Legend of Neal-Mor
1384605 The Dead
1384609 The Hell Fire Club
1384611 Garett Og's Haunting
1384612 Sheela-na-Skean
1384614 The Banshee
1384615 The Dead Soldier
1384616 The Holy Well and the Murderer
1384617 The Last-Witch Burning
1384621 Kathleen
1384622 The Fatal Love Charm
1396081 Murderous Night on Pinaki Atoll
1396084 Psychic Experiences of Famous People
1396088 I Walked on Fire
1399939 Wolf in Snake's Clothes
1402556 The Italian Count
1414849 Diamond in the Rough
1450154 Selected Bibliography
1455788 Lifetides (Excerpt)
1465549 Introduction (Star Wars: A New Hope)
1496379 Introduction (In the Beginning: Tales from the Pulp Era)
1515734 The Christmas Megapack
1516439 The Second Christmas Megapack
1544067 Fried Green Tomatoes: Terry Bisson Interviewed
1544068 Bibliography (Terry Bisson )
Fortunately a lot are in the same book as several others and can be edited en masse. BLongley 22:36, 7 March 2013 (UTC).
At least half of these are in records which give the source as The Supernatural Index. Looking at my copy of the book, I see that it gives these essays as "nf". So I suppose the editor who entered them thought we used the same designation. Now all we have to do is find which editor(s) (other than me) have copies of The Supernatural Index, or try to catch it when we moderate the next submission that does the same thing. Mhhutchins 01:43, 8 March 2013 (UTC)
Bill, can you run this script again, to see if I cleaned all of these? Thanks. Mhhutchins 22:20, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
Here you go: 
id      title
102887	 H. G. Wells: Critic of Progress
1072560 The Man in White
1080292 The Flatwoods Monster
1091805 The Amazing Laser
1127487 Knights of Takhisis
1194058 Dedication: Elinor McKay

BLongley 07:35, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Bill. Mhhutchins 16:54, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Adding Series

Hi, I found that "R. Scott Bakker" page should have mega series named: "The Second Apocalypse" which should inculde

  • "The Prince of Nothing" series and
  • "The Aspect-Emperor" series.

Here are some proofs:

Qshadow 10:35, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing this out. I see someone has already combined them into one series for you. Chavey 14:27, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
Yes, I see but the name of the series is wrong. I will change it and see if it is accepted. Qshadow 15:32, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
BLongely accepted. Qshadow 16:44, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

"The Return of The Stainless Steel Rat" by Harry Harrison?

Was work with such title "The Return of The Stainless Steel Rat" ever written by Harry Harrison? (Don't confuse with "The Stainless Steel Rat Returns" it is different work)

Wikipedia says that it was published in "Ares Magazine #10": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harrison

Also Fantlab says it is by Harry Harrison but there is a comment by one of the readers that it may be a fanfiction. Qshadow 11:05, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

If it is really by Harrison, we should add it to his titles. Qshadow 11:05, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Tomlinson in this pub, states that's the case ("The story introduces and sets the scene for a board game which came complete with the magazine.", it also seems to be a very short one (4 pages). You can add it if you want. Hervé Hauck 13:21, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
Hauck, how can I add this title? I need to create new pub of magazine type? and what do you put in the editor field? I wish it could be as simple as just adding title name and year... Qshadow 13:42, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
It probably can be done along the lines of this example, but I'm a bit out of my league here, there are surely other moderators with more mileage than me who would be more precise (or helpful). Hervé Hauck 14:27, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
I have submitted the title and magazine, let's see how it comes out. Qshadow 15:37, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
Must be ok, BLongely accepted. Qshadow 16:45, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
I've added further information to the record, sourced from the author's website. Even more importantly, I gave the source of my data, something which should have been done in the original submission. The story itself can be found online. Mhhutchins 20:56, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine

When I did a search for the above title under Magazine, only the Polish version appeared. Should this be corrected?--Teddybear 20:36, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, found I had to leave off Isaac when searching for that magazine. The actual name though includes Isaac. Only Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine does not have Isaac in the title.--Teddybear 20:45, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
"Isaac" was dropped from the title of the magazine more than 20 years ago (see here). We chose to use the current name for the series (which is what you're searching for despite what it says in the search field). Although it's possible to create two separate series, there is value to keeping them together. Mhhutchins 20:53, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
BTW, when it comes to searching, it's better to be less specific to get more results. The ISFDB software only gives exact search results not fuzzy ones. Mhhutchins 20:54, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Titles that should belong to Series (by Fantlab)

Hi All, I have made a small list of titles that belong to series on Fantlab.ru (like ISFDB but in russian). Please use google translate embeded on site or external to navigate Fantlab, it works perfect. I put the list here: Fantlab_ISFDB_MissingSeries, but i can't make it look normally (I have it in excel back home). Please suggest how to fix it. After this I hope we will start working on it. Qshadow 21:18, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

No need to fix the list on that page I removed it, Let's try something new this time, here is editable for all Table on GoogleDocs, there are two columns on the righ ToAdd(Yes/No) and "comments" if needed, please help me by marking wich titles should be added to series. Qshadow 21:34, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
I think SF readers tend to want to classify, group, sort, arrange, etc. an author's work, probably more so than the authors themselves (the ISFDB's existence is evidence of that). So I would suggest that before making submissions to enter these stories into a series that you find a corroborating reliable source, especially the author's official website. Thanks. Mhhutchins 22:17, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
What if there is no author website or any other source, but it is clearly part of a series (for people who read the title)? In many cases there are no websites especially for less known authors. Qshadow 09:24, 12 March 2013 (UTC)
If you've read the work and can confirm that "it is clearly part of a series" please proceed to make submissions to add the series. (We have to take your word that you've read it.) If you've not read the work but can find corroboration of Fantlab's data with any other source, be it an authorized website or not, feel free to make submissions. But give your sources in the Note to Moderator field and be prepared to answer any inquiries from the moderator. Mhhutchins 22:33, 12 March 2013 (UTC)
Even if I read some works on the list in the past, I do not rememeber now enough to be sure of anything. I will try to find some authorized resource, maybe some of the editors here will take a look and find some titles that they are familiar with too. Qshadow 13:35, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Skin City

I just entered some details to the entry Kissing Carrion and one of the stories Skin City is listed on this site as having been published in 1994 in A Kind of Crimson Evil although the acknowledgment page of Kissing Carrion lists the story as being copyrighted in 1995. Anybody knows which is right? MLB 21:35, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

Both are right. Works published in December may be copyrighted the following year. Copyright has nothing to do with publication. A work can be copyrighted without ever having been published. A work can be published without ever having been copyrighted. Mhhutchins 22:37, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

A restarting Publication Series

This series was 'restarted' twice during its life, with the same name and numeration beginning from 1 (they are not reprints of the first series): for a publication history, see Wikipedia (in Italian). Has something like this happened before in ISFDB? Since the publications are 9 in the second one and 2 in the third and final one, I do not think they deserve a Pub Series by themselves ("Fantasy Urania second series"). One solution could be to keep the series name as the original one but adding to the series number the information, like "1 (second series)" and explaining the printing history in the notes of the pub series record: in the series grid it would appear ok (especially when sorted by date ...). I'll wait for an opinion before starting to add publications. Thanks --Pips55 21:09, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

If you disambiguate the name (as in "Fantasy Urania second series", etc.), there will be three different series with no way to connect the three. They could not be displayed together. Unless you can think of a strong reason that they should all be displayed on one publication series page, I'd suggest doing a disambiguation. Otherwise you'd have to come up with some numbering system that would separate the three parts of the series. Adding series name to the number might be overkill, but give it a try for a few records and see how they display on the pub series list. Mhhutchins 23:02, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Adding a discussion item to the Rules and Standards Discussion Page

I would like to initiate discussion on a new topic ("ISFDB policy on the date of novels initially printed in magazines and later in book format")in the Rules and Standards Discussion Page, but get an error message ("You do not have permission to do that, for the following reason: You do not have permission to edit pages in the Page namespace") when I click on the link "to add a new section, click here" on the R&S Discussion Page. Could you kindly advise on what I am doing wrong or on what I need to do to obtain the permission to start the discussion topic? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by RMS (talk • contribs) .

That's strange. I'm not sure how you could edit this wiki page and not the Rules & Standards page. Are you certain that was the page you tried to edit? (And not the Policy page or any other restricted page?) Also, are you certain that you were logged in at the time you made the first attempt? Mhhutchins 18:52, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
Users with a low edit count are limited to editing a restricted subset of Wiki pages to thwart spambots. Once RMS has made a few more edits, s/he will be able to edit any Wiki page. Ahasuerus 20:09, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
I wasn't aware of that feature. What is the magic number? This editor made more than 20 submissions the other day. Mhhutchins 20:20, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
This is a built-in feature of the Wiki software, so it only counts Wiki edits. RMS has made 3 Wiki edits so far, so s/he is still under the threshold, but will exceed it soon. I am not sure it would be wise to post the exact number publicly in case some spambot operator is reading this... Ahasuerus 22:07, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Automated submissions

I would like to give it a try to automated submission; to avoid adding mis-interpretations to my difficulties of sending XML with Visual Basic, I have a couple of questions concerning the data format for new pubs. First, what should I do with the Tag optional tag? --Pips55 22:31, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Publication tags are deprecated and should not be submitted. I have corrected the Help page -- thanks for catching it. Ahasuerus 00:20, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

Second, if I have no additional contents to add (e.g. a Novel), should an empty Content section be present? --Pips55 22:31, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Nope, that was another misleading statement which has been removed. Ahasuerus 00:20, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

The help page cites titles undergoing change, which obviously are not present in a new pub (maybe a leftover from a copy/paste of the XML pub update page ?). --Pips55 22:31, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it was a copy/paste artifact. Gone now. Ahasuerus 00:20, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

I think there are a few omissions in the documentation: in the Web API page, in the submission example, the IsfdbSubmission (and Content) tags are missing, while the LicenseKey is not present in the Data Submission Formats. If appropriate, I will gladly carry on the necessary additions. Thanks. --Pips55 22:31, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

I'll try to clean up the rest of the Help page, but the best way to learn how to build a NewPub submission is probably by dumping the contents of an existing one using the dumpxml.cgi script, e.g. this submission. Ahasuerus 00:20, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, and now (sound of knuckles crackling) to coding ... --Pips55 19:59, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

By the Blood of Heroes

I have this book, and they keep changing the numberlines on me and I'm a touch confused. The numberline goes as such 12 13 14 15 16 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. As this book is copyrighted in 2012 I'm going to assume that it was printed in that year. I know I bought mine at Christmas time of that year. Hard to believe that this was such a hot seller that it went through twelve printing in one year. So does the 12 through 16 mean that this is the year printed? And is the 10 through 1 the printing history? And what does the OV/RRD mean? MLB 23:04, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

This should have been posted on the Help Desk page (this is the Help Desk talk page, for discussions about the Help Desk). I'll respond to your question and after I'm sure you've read it, I'll move it to the correct page for archiving.
Now to your question: Never use the copyright date as the date of publication (I'm sure we've gone over this before). Never assume a publication date based on the year of copyright. It should be used only when all sources have been exhausted.
In this case the number line gives you both the year of publication and the printing number. (There is no industry standard about number lines. Each publisher has their own way of doing it, and can change it before you turn around.) Your copy is the first printing of 2012. If they did the second printing today the number line would be changed to 13 14 15 16 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2. If they did the third printing next week, it would be 13 14 15 16 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3. If they did the fourth printing next year it would be 14 15 16 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4. As for the middle letters, I suspect it's the publisher's code for which press it was printed on. But I couldn't swear to that and anyway, it's not that important. Just record the line as given. Mhhutchins 23:27, 4 February 2013 (UTC)
Okay, thanks. MLB 21:51, 17 April 2013 (UTC)
Moved to the proper page. Mhhutchins 22:07, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

Pandora's Daughter

I have Pandora's Daughter, and it brings up a question. This is a book club edition. but what club? Johansen is a popular author and her works have seen multiple book club editions I'm sure. So, how does somebody know which book club has printed a book? MLB 21:57, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

What is the evidence that your copy is a book club edition? Is the price lacking from the dustjacket and is there a seven digit number printed on the back of the dustjacket? If so, it was published by Bookspan for any number of its book club divisions. I don't believe it was ever a selection of the SFBC. If you've determined it definitely is a book club edition, you should clone the current record for the trade edition, change the publisher to "St. Martin's Press / BCE", leaving the date and price fields blank. Mhhutchins 22:03, 17 April 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for your help. In answer to your questions. Is the price lacking? Yes. Is there a seven digit number printed on the book's back dust jacket? Yes. Printing date? No, just a copyright date. MLB 09:19, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

New Yorker blog

The New Yorker has published a story by Roger Ebert on their blog but not, as far as I can tell, in their magazine. Any suggestion on how to add this? Gamaliel 03:40, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

With few exceptions, web-only publications are not eligible for the database. Downloadable files and ezines (in PDF, EPUB, MOBI, etc formats), and a few webzines are eligible. If we allowed web-only (HTML) publications, we would be overwhelmed by the onslaught of submissions. Mhhutchins 04:56, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

Review format?

I've been adding new novels for a couple weeks now, and I'm starting to get the hang of it. I want to start adding reviews for the novels I add, but I don't quite understand what is supposed to be filled in for those fields, and I haven't found any help in the help documents here. Will someone please give me some guidance? Remontant 15:39, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Well, the exact help text is to be found here, for example. Note that at its beginning this text refers to review columns. If you only have one review to add, just add it in the publication's section reserved for reviews (there are sections for general contents such as stories and essays and for interviews also in every edit screen for a publication). You'll have to enter the exact title and author of the reviewed work: provided the work is already in the ISFDB, the software will automatically link the review to the reviewed work. If you had for example a typo, it'll still be possible to link the review later. It should work quite flawless for reviews of books and shortfictions. Please ask again, if you stumble over any problems. Stonecreek 16:32, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
Unless I'm misunderstanding, I assume you want to add your own personal review of the works. If this is the case, it can only be added to the database if it has been published in an eligible publication, i.e. a speculative fiction (or related) periodical or book. It would be added as a content record in the review section of the publication record. The help page to do that is the one which Stonecreek has linked to above. Otherwise, unpublished reviews by ISFDB editors are not eligible for the database. Mhhutchins 13:48, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
On the other hand, GoodReads.com, Amazon.com, and some similar sites are good places to add our personal reviews of books we've read. Different web sites have different missions. Chavey 14:49, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

The Man from Mars

I am linking The Man from Mars with the original "The Man from Mars", however, does anybody have a copy of the original unverified pulp Wonder Stories Quarterly, Summer 1931 to see if it was originally printed with quotation marks? MLB 22:23, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

I'm sure if any of the current editors had a copy they would have already verified the record. Looking at secondary sources: Miller/Contento gives the quotation marks for both the Wonder Stories Quarterly appearance and the Startling Stories reprint. Day gives it on neither. So for the time being, until a primary verifier comes along, we'll have to accept that one is a variant of the other. (BTW, this type of inquiry would better have been posted on the Verification Requests page.) Thanks. Mhhutchins 23:11, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
There's a verification requests page?!? I didn't know that. So much more to learn, I don't think I'll ever know it all. MLB 07:57, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

ISBN problem

I have the 1st Baen printing of Dickson's & Harrison'd THE LIFESHIP [7]. I problem is the current entry has the ISBN from the cover, spine & bar code, while the copyright page has a different ISBN. WorldCat has the book listed under both ISBNs. So which has priority, cover or copyright page?Don Erikson 20:42, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

I don't think it's written in stone, but I would go for the copyright page being the primary number. You can record any other number in the note field. Either way, it's not a big deal, as long as you record the different locations of the various numbers. Mhhutchins 21:28, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
You could also look up both ISBN's in Amazon, or Look Up By ISBN and see if one of the numbers goes to Lifeship and the other to a different book. Then you would know for sure that one of them was a mistake. Chavey 01:55, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Obituaries

Hello. Is there a way to link an obituary to an author, like REVIEW to a title, or INTERVIEW to an author? Cheers, ForJohnScalzi 01:00, 1 May 2013 (UTC).

What I usually do is to put a link to the obituary in the Author Biography page. In a few cases, the obituary has so much information about the author that I've put that link as one of the "webpage" entries for that author. But there isn't any "special" link such as we have for reviews and interviews. (Although you could always make a Feature Request for one.) Chavey 01:51, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Translated Author's name

In this pub, I have two authors that are presented with their translated names (Luciano di Samosata for Lucian of Samosata and Giovanni Keplero for Johannes Kepler): I am in doubt if create synonyms or use directly the names are already present in ISFDB. I'd go for the synonyms, but I am not sure a synonym can be considered an alternate name. Advice ? Thanks --Pips55 22:34, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Following current ISFDB standards, you're pretty much obliged to record the credit exactly as given, create a pseudonym and make a variant title record. One day we might have a different author relationship other than pseudonym. There was talk of creating a "nickname" relationship (which would work better in this case), but that may be way on down the road. Mhhutchins 22:57, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Upload cover images

I'm still new here and every time I think I'm clicking the right link it turns out to be the wrong procedure. I want to upload 'my' own cover image to a listing that doesn't have one. I went to the help file [8] and it states.. click the link labeled "Upload cover image". I see on the listing page "Upload cover scan"... Is this the same? Can this be changed to match? SpanishMill 14:38, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it's the same thing. And I fixed the help to match. Thanks for catching the mismatch, and sorry about the confusion. --MartyD 16:14, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Ghost writers

I'm sure I know the answer, but the brain cell responsible is refusing to divulge the information. How do we record a work credited to Author A but known via secondary sources to have been ghost-written by Author B (and never having been published under any byline other than Author A)? --MartyD 12:14, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

I'm assuming, in this case, that both authors are real persons. If there is reliable secondary evidence that Author B wrote the work, then the title record of the work is varianted to one that credits Author B. Do not make Author B into a pseudonym of Author A (the credited author) unless Author A is a housename. The varianting alone will move the title record from A's summary page to B's summary page. The drawback is that the title will not appear at all on A's summary page, so anyone looking in the database on the published author's summary page won't find the ISFDB record. They would have to do a search for the title. Here are various scenarios and how each have been handled in the db:
  • Example 1, an author writes a book solo which is credited to an entirely different author: Andrew Niederman has written 90% of the books published as by V. C. Andrews. Those titles credited to Andrews which are 100% known to have been written by Niederman are varianted to a record crediting him. Niederman has not been made into a pseudonym of Andrews. None of the titles written solely by Niederman appears on Andrews' summary page. Darrah Chavey came up with a clever way of directing users to Niederman's page.
  • Example 2, two authors co-write a work which is credited solely to only one of them: Diana L. Paxson co-wrote The Forest House with Marion Zimmer Bradley, but it was credited solely to Bradley. MZB herself made it clear that it was co-written by Paxson. So we varianted the title record crediting MZB to one which credits both.
  • Example 3, an author writes a book which is credited to her and another author who had no involvement in the actual writing of the work. Paxson wrote the last three novels of Bradley's Avalon series. The fifth one, Ancestors of Avalon, was credited to both authors (for marketing purposes, I'm sure) even though it is widely accepted as a solo effort by Paxson. So we entered the pubs as credited, but varianted the title record which credit both to one which credits Paxson alone. Mhhutchins 15:13, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, and I do like that clever approach. I think I may just have to copy it.... --MartyD 01:24, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Colored dye used on tops of books

Just need some information regarding the dye used on both pb and hc books, some of which I have in my own collection. I am aware of remainder marking and the speckling done with dyes. I've read that the full dye (solid color) on the tops is some kind of dust protection and/or that it may be a remainder marking. Any thoughts? Is this something that needs to be added to the notes section of a publication?

I have in my collection a 1966 printing of the BCE Foundation trilogy Trilogy_Bookwith a full red/orange dye across the top of the text block. Also, have Clarke's BCE City and Stars City_Stars_Bookwith full blue dye on the top of the text block. Including a couple of 1st/1st paperbacks with red/orange dye on the whole text block (top,bottom,side). SpanishMill 18:22, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

I've always thought it was nothing more than for aesthetic reasons. I could be wrong. (The remainder speckling/spraying has a more obvious reason than the solidly dyed ones.) Feel free to record it in the Note field of those records you have primary verified, but if there are any other PVs, discuss it with them. Their copies may have a different dye-job. Mhhutchins 18:25, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
And if that primary is no longer around such as Dragoondelight Can I then become the primary on this one? 12th planet pb SpanishMill 20:24, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
There are four other Primary verification slots. Use the first available one (which I see you already have). There is no priority in the Primary verifiers' positions. It's not a ranking, just a way of saying "I have a copy, and can verify the data given in this record is correct. If you have any questions, contact me." Of course, the active editor will always be the one picked on. :) Mhhutchins 00:48, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

The Bottle Imp #8

I'm considering indexing one issue of the Scottish arts magazine, The Bottle Imp #8. It has the ISSN 1574-1544. My hesitation comes from the fact that it's a borderline candidate in a couple of ways: 1) it's mostly a non-genre e-zine, however this issue from 2010 focussed entirely on Scottish science fiction; 2) while the magazine is not downloadable as a PDF publication in its entirety, individual articles are, e.g. see the top right corner of the articles here and here. The last bullet point of Rule of Acquisition #1 is not explicit in this case. Is there a precedent in the database for this borderline type of publication, or do other moderators consider it Out? PeteYoung 10:30, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Exceptions have been made for web-only publications, but mostly for fiction published on websites which are recognized by the SFWA as a professional market (e.g. Tor.com, Strange Horizons). If you take on the responsibility as "curator" of this publication, you should make a screenshot of its content page and upload the image file to the record's Bibliographic Comments page, using the Table of Contents license tag. (You never know when websites are going to disappear, so that's the purpose of doing a screenshot to record its contents in case the website shuts down.) Let me know if you need assistance on how to do this. For an example, go to the last issue of Rudy Rucker's webzine Flurb. Mhhutchins 15:57, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
I find it rather odd that the authors of the pieces aren't credited on the contents page nor are they credited on the pages of the individual pieces. The only way to know who wrote them is to download the pdfs. You'll have to do that, save them all to your computer as a back-up reference, and do a primary verification of the ISFDB record so that you'll be able to answer questions for future users of the db. Mhhutchins 16:06, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Sorry, I just discovered they're credited only at the bottom of the last page in the web versions. I would still recommend that you save the pdfs if you're going to do a primary verification of the record. Mhhutchins 16:12, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Worldcat verification

I usually use Worldcat to check data from other sources as ISBN, pub year, series or number and (loosely) translator and contents, citing OCLC number in notes. Do these operations qualify for a verification ? I am aware of Worldcat inaccuracies and ambiguities, but I am in doubt especially about the page numbers, which not always match those of my sources (Fantascienza.com, at the moment, which have a marked preference for even page numbers ...): should I state the difference and verify anyway ? Thanks --Pips55 22:22, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

If you use a specific OCLC record as the source for your data, it's good to give that number in the Note field (linking is optional) and checking the OCLC/Worldcat box in a verification of the record. If any of the ISFDB record's data fields do not match the linked OCLC record, the discrepancy should be noted, and the source for the data should be given. If this is the case, I personally wouldn't do an OCLC/Worldcat verification, but there's nothing in the standards that I'm aware of that prohibits this. Just let the user know that there are discrepancies between the two records. Mhhutchins 03:01, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
I think you have just about everything there, although there are a few other things you can check on: (1) The size of the book will tell you if it's pb vs. tp, although not hard vs soft cover, in case you don't already know that (Amazon sometimes tells us hard vs. soft, but not pb vs. tp); (2) Is there a summary description of the book? Only a modest fraction of records have these, but they can be useful to put into the Title Record "Synopsis" when they do; (3) On occasion, the record will list additional people under "Responsibility", e.g. an illustrator for the book, or the author of a preface/intro. If other names are listed there, they usually deserve to make it into the Pub record. If you've done the things from your list, and see if any of these 3 extras apply, then you've done a full WorldCat verification.
The one other thing that I will do, but which I suspect most verifiers do not do, is to click on the "View all editions and formats" link on line three of the main record. Some of the links in that list will not be the edition that you are verifying, but it's not uncommon to have multiple OCLC records for the same edition of a book. In those cases, I open up all of the links for the edition of the book that I'm verifying. I often find that some will have different information than others, and I can get more information than if I just take the link(s) WorldCat gives me when I search for the book. This sometimes means that you have several OCLC links that you can add to the notes. If there are more than two such links, I will select those with the most information. If there are still too many links (which happens to me more often than I would expect), on the remaining candidates I click the "Show libraries holding just this edition" link, and select those OCLC records that are held by the most libraries -- both because they're more likely to be accurate, and because I could imagine database users using that link to find a nearby library that has a copy of the book. Again, this last part is probably overkill, but you can add this step if you want to be thorough. On the issue of accuracy, for example, several times I have found one OCLC record that says the book is 260 pages while another says it's 257 pages. That usually means the longer count included extra blank pages, and the shorter count is probably the one we use. Chavey 03:21, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
Also keep in mind that the underlying library records used to construct OCLC records are often more complete. It can be a hassle to follow various links (make sure to limit the list to the right edition first!), but the results can be rewarding. Ahasuerus 03:39, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
Thank you all for the clear suggestions. I have already met (and somewhat managed) the situation with multiple OCLC links, but I think that the advice to favor the OCLC held by the most libraries is a very considerate one. --Pips55 19:53, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Revisions and new stories

How significant does a revision have to be to be listed as a separate story? The two cases I have in mind are these:

  • Marsheila Rockwell "Auf Widershins" (1993) was, according to her webpage, "later revised and published as" "Auf Widdershins" (2006). Not familiar with the stories so I can't speak to the differences.
  • Ruben Dario "Veronica" (1896) was retitled "The Strange Death of Fray Gomez" (1913), but the textual changes otherwise amount to a few words here and there ("Kodak" for "photograph", etc.).

Thoughs? Gamaliel 16:28, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Well, if we don't know about the amount of changes, it seems difficult to impossible to judge. So, I'd think it'd be best to leave it as is.
In the second case a note added to the title would be sufficient (just as you formulated it). These changes really don't amount to a separate story in my opinion. Stonecreek 18:19, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
Variants are based solely on a change in either the title or author credit. So you can use that function in both cases you cite (the spelling of the titles changed). If the titles and author credits are identical, changes in text can not be used to create a variant title record. As Christian said above, a revision in text can only be noted in the title record, even though I've seen attempts by other editors to create a disambiguated title record. For example: here and here. This last approach is discouraged, because there's no way to know the extent of the revision, and it creates two separate records that has no connection to each other. The user of the database has no way of knowing there are two different records for essentially the same story. There was talk of creating a new function which connects titles based on textual relationships, but there doesn't seem to be any movement in that direction. This is probably due to the small number of software writers and prioritization of necessary, required, and/or previously requested software updates.
BTW, expansion of a short story into a novel length work which keeps the same title (e.g. here and here) is a different matter. Because these are typed differently, there's no need to disambiguate (even though I've seen attempts in the db to do this.) But it would be nice to have the proposed relationship function in cases like this as well. It could also be used for fix-up novels, adaptations (by other hands), abridgments, and excerpts. Maybe one day... Mhhutchins 19:34, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
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