Some authors have stories in multiple author anthologies and later release that as a separate book. So far I have listed the stories in the plot section, but that is cumbersome to check if I have that story in there. Should these be treated as a box set?
Since the Mobile apps doesn’t support Contents View, I think you’re talking about the Desktop Program.
It is possible to search for a story title using the Contents View. This will list all books containing a story you searched for.
I don’t think you should use the Box Set feature in BoC for this. If you got several thousands Stories, this would result in thousands of Box Sets. (I got more than 50.000 stories in my DB, so I know something about this, I hope.)
I am using Book Connect. I don’t see a tab for Content there. I see your point about the Box Set feature.
Connect also doesn’t support Contents view (sadly–those are the few kinds of features that keep me on desktop). This is a big desire for me to at least be able to view this stuff, as it becomes harder to track whether I have a story (or even an entire novel, as I have a good-sized number of novel-anthologies) in anything but desktop.
I’d also agree that using boxsets would be…unwieldy, though. And I’ve only got ~4,000 stories,
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I didn’t know the desktop version had this option. I have been experimenting in Connect with alternatives but not successful. Maybe I should switch to desktop.
I use the desktop version as well, because I’ve got many science fiction magazines, multi-author anthologies and single author collections that I need to record the content of.
Regarding Box Set, what I do find this really useful is for recording omnibus volumes; the Box Set is the overall omnibus, and the contents are the individual books in the omnibus.
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This isn’t a bad thought. I do something like that for Movies.
- Add the boxset as its own item (also “inside” the boxset: I forget the reason I started doing this whole step, but I think it’s because the boxset as an “object” isn’t easily “examined” or expanded on)
- Add the individual contents to the box set as well.
So your book approach makes a lot of sense to me, since it’s basically how I do movies. Hmmmmm.
Movies is just “better equipped” for this in that it doesn’t treat the movies as inherently physical objects but “pieces of art”, so you can add one with no barcode, cover art, etc and just tie it to a listing for the slightly-more-abstract “set of sounds and pictures”. Books doesn’t really work on “collection of words” so much as “particular printed incarnation of collection of words”. Suppose I could always unlink and strip away “identifying” information like barcodes, though…
(let’s not talk about how I deal with anthologies over in Comics, that one’s way messier and way more reliant on custom fields…)
Well, I use the User Defined Fields for tracking information about stories belonging together.
For example: I added a “Series” Pick List Field to Story. A “Published” Text Field to “Book+Story” , and an “URL” Text Field to Story. (For the record: I first added a “Publisher-No.” Text Field to Book and Story".
I use the Publisher Field to record Publisher No. (on the spine) for Books.
For the Stories take a look at (Data from Publication: Analog Science Fact -> Science Fiction, February 1963 added to the URL Field of the “Book”):
(Title) “analog SCIENCE FACT & SCIENCE FICTION” Magazine
(Sub-Title) “February 1963 — CODE THREE by Rick Raphael”,
Contents Story 4 (Title) “Hilifter” from Gordon R. Dickson.
Series Field contains “None But Man (Gordon R. Dickson)”
Published additionally in “Baen: Jan 1989, “None But Man”; Baen: Jan. 1989, “None But Man”; Baen: 07 Nov. 2017, “None But Man””
Rem.: The Title “None But Man” I recorded only, because sometimes the Title of the Story changed sometimes in other magazines/books. (ISFDB recorded them as “previously” published in … or alike)
Rem.: I add the author to the Series field, because sometimes a series has different authors or are completely unrelated.
If you added the stories in such a way, you can sort on UserDefined Fields and get all stories belonging together.
Rem.: The URL Field would contain a link to a Wikipedia Entry. For example for the story Nightfall (Isaac Asimov): Einbruch der Nacht – Wikipedia or if you like to Nightfall (Asimov novelette and novel) - Wikipedia
Same Magazine:
Story Title “The Sound of Gasping” from Mel Sturgis
Serie: “Science Tact (Analog)”
Any comments?
Ah, yeah! ISFDB has been an incredible resource to pull from for me as well.
I added a multi-enum checkbox list for “Franchise” for a way to capture series with “internal” series (eg Erikson and Esslemont’s Malazan books), so that the “Franchise” is the high-level, then “Series” I just retained and fill-out for books, or stories individually as required, since there are definitely anthologies that have series and non-series stories in 'em. This works perfectly for grouping things, using folder view of Franchise > Series (so I can see all the Malazan books, then each individual series underneath)
I haven’t gone to a field for “other locations this was published” myself, but even then it’s the matter of pulling it up on mobile and knowing that I already have Storm of Seasons from Thieves’ World (speaking of multiple authors…), because I have the Cross-Currents Omnibus that contains it.
That last point is actually where the solution sounds very close to my Comics approach:
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I add the collection itself, mark it as a “collection” in a custom field [so I can either include or exclude it, particularly for the reasons of statistics]
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I add the individual comics in a collection, mark them in a custom field as “component” (as opposed to an actual floppy I physically own) [similar to above: helps statistics to indicate I have 100 issues written by so-and-so, not 5—because there are 5 omnibuses containing 20 issues each—which is misleading]
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Another custom field (“Collected In”) identifies what collection(s) the issue appears in. I can (and do) apply this to issues I own individually and in collections. And since it’s a multi-enum/checkbox list, they can appear in >1 [and now I can see, at least on desktop, where I’ve got it, and whether I have the “Real thing” because it either is or isn’t just a “Component”]
This all works so I can then see if I have in some form (collected or otherwise) since it’s in my collection as “a comic” and I can avoid unnecessary/unintentional duplicates.
I should probably consider the above approach for my novel anthologies though, like Publication: American Science Fiction: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960s, so that I know I’ve got Vance’s Emphyrio, etc, as those actually were published as books, even if I don’t have an individual, physical “book” for each one
It’s much more painful when trying to determine (as I’ve put entirely too much effort into) whether I’ve got a particular Harlan Ellison story, since they’ve been re-compiled endlessly (and I have ~502 stories and essays from him across 27 books, with enough duplication that in “Story” view I’ve got 596 from him—another custom field lets me flag “redundancy”)
I don’t think “Story Collectorz” even makes sense as we’ve kind of discussed above, so I don’t know how to most easily represent (to my “Mobile” self on CLZ when I’m out and about) that I do or don’t have a story/set of stories that appears in a book I’m finding out somewhere and debating purchasing.
Well, I forgot to mention, that creating User Defined Fields isn’t enough, the data has to be displayed too. So you have to modify the current template, for displaying such data (only possible in BoC on PC).