Help:Screen:AddAward

This page is a help or manual page for the ISFDB database. It describes standards or methods for entering or maintaining data in the ISFDB database, or otherwise working with the database. Other help pages may be found via the category below. To discuss what should go on this page, use the talk page. If, after exploring the Help system, you still have a question, please visit the Help desk and let us know. We probably know the answer, but we need your help to know what we left out of the help pages. If you are new to editing the ISFDB, please see Help:Getting Started. For more on this and other header templates, see Header templates.

The Add Award editor allows you to add award information to a specific title. This is selected by selecting the "Add Award Information to This Title" link on the title page, or by selecting the "Add Untitled Award" link on the award page. You will see the following fields:

• Title: This field will be pre-filled by the application if you selected "Add Award Information to This Title". If you selected "Add Untitled Award" then you are adding an award for something other than a bibliographic title:
  • If the item has a title, but the title refers to an object which is not a standard kind of ISFDB title (for instance, the name of a magazine or a nongenre reference book, etc), then you can add the title to this field. When the award is displayed during normal use, the ISFDB will NOT generate a link to a title record.
  • If the item has no possible title (i.e.: Best Artist, Best Editor, Best Book Publisher, categories), then place the word "untitled" in this field. When the award is displayed a "----" will be displayed in the title column.
• Author: This field will be pre-filled by the application if you selected "Add Award Information to This Title". If you selected "Add Untitled Award" it is up to the editor to find the canonical name in the database and enter it here.
• Year: This should contain the year (as YYYY-00-00) of the award - not the year of publication. The award year can be somewhat contentious; sometimes the year of eligibility is used, and in other cases the year the award is handed out is used. If you are pulling in awards information from an external source, sync on a year that the ISFDB already has data for and make the year for the new data consistent with the current year usage.
• Award Name: This is a pulldown menu which is fairly explanatory (except for the part where you don't confuse the John W. Campbell Award with the John W. Campbell Memorial Award).
• Category: The category is the title of the award, such as "Best Novel", or "Best SF Novel", or "Best Novelette". When the awards are displayed for a particular year (say 1993 Hugo Award), they will be grouped according to categories. Note the categories within a particular award (like the Hugos) may officially differ from year to year. One should defer to the official titles as found in the press release for the award.
• Award Level: Okay, this one can be a bit complicated. In general, awards come in two major flavors: those with winners and nominees (such as the Hugo awards), and those with enumerated poll numbers (such as the Locus Poll). For nominee-type awards, data can be entered when the nominees are first announced (that is, there are no winners yet), and changed when the winner is announced at a later date. In these cases, select the radio button for either Nomination or Win. For poll-type awards, enter the award ranking in the field called Level. At one point we entered Preliminary Nominees that showed up on the long list, before the final short list was selected. My best advice is: don't worry about those anymore. You can't edit the ones already in the database, and you can only enter new ones if you are very clever (hint: you would have to examine the display source code).
• Movie URL: The movie URL link is intended for linking dramatic presentations to the IMDB. You should not use this field if you selected "Add Award Information to This Title", as this only applies to movies.

Notes:

• For bibliographic titles, the title MUST exist in the database before performing any awards activities. This is probably the hardest aspect of awards editing. If an award for best novella is given to a title that doesn't exist in the database, then it needs to be entered into the ISFDB. That could mean tracking down an original anthology or magazine, and entering that data first.
• For non-bibliographic titles, you may only enter awards information from an awards page. That means you must either enter at least one bibliographic award for that year (and add the non-bibliographic ones from that new display page), or you must enter the non-bibliographic title from a previous year for that award, and update the year to the new award year.