Help talk:Screen:NewPub

The page currently states:

Books. For a book, use the title page to get the title. This is typically the page with the copyright information on the back. If the title has a subtitle, you don't need to enter it; this is sometimes a judgement call as to whether a change of font or a colon indicates a separate subtitle or just some creative license on the part of the typesetter. If in doubt, take your best guess and document the guess on the publication's wiki page.

This is somewhat at odds with the current practice. Typically, when entering a new Publication title, I try to stick as close to what the title page says as possible, including obvious subtitles like "A Novel" and "Book 18 in the Spellbingding Adventures series". However, once the Pub has been files, I then go back and clean up the "Title title" field so that the Author's biblio pages look reasonable. The main reason for this approach is that I have found that subtitles can be quite informative: they can help recreate Series data, disambiguate different editions (whenever subtitles change), etc. This is also a good example of previously mentioned differences between the "objective" data that is found in Publication records and "derived" or "subjective" data that is found in Title records. Ahasuerus 17:52, 20 Dec 2006 (CST)

I take the point about disambiguation. The OED does something similar: they use the full title (which may be very long) on their equivalent of the publication record, and a shortened form in the citations.

This would require users to take an additional step after entering a book with a subtitle, though. That seems a bad thing. I do see it done (somewhat inconsistently) in the database already, though; for example "The Language of the Night" has two pubs without the subtitle, one of which I entered, and one with the subtitle. "Tehanu", on the other hand, has the subtitle in the title record. I'm a bit concerned that the latter situation is what we'll start to see if we take this approach. However, it may be manageable through notes and the wiki author pages.

It would be more of an issue with "New <publication>" than with "Add Pub to this Title", because the latter will get the title correct, regardless of how it's entered. I would also have to document this in a couple of other places; it means that the rules for pub.title are different than for title.title. I'll wait to see if there are more comments; then I'll make some changes to the help file -- or feel free to go do the same. Mike Christie (talk) 20:12, 20 Dec 2006 (CST)