Wanted: FAQ or help page for work separations

I was here yesterday with a problematic combination that needed fixing, and people fixed it for me.

Today I added 3 more books to my library, and found another combination error needing fixing - obvious enough that the only help I need is with the mechanics, and with best practices for keeping this from happening again.

Clearly, my library is prone to weird books that get mis-combined a lot. I need to learn how to fix this situation when I find it,

The current mess is work 3139855 - all 3 individual volumes I added got associated with this work, which primarily refers to volumes one and two as a set. 14 books are associated with it; 5 are for the 2 volume set; 5 have ambiguous names (probably for the complete set, which for all I know has been printed in different numbers of volumes at different times), and 3, added manually by me today, are individual volumes.

There are also multiple works for single-volumes, not associated with this work.

Of course the work predates ISBNs, and is long out of copyright. Facsimile editions retain title pages from 1931 or so - no ISBN or LC, making mistakes very easy.

I can and will click separate for all three of my single volumes, and then try combining them with other works which are obviously the same single volume. (I'll let you know if I can't figure out the UI.)

But how do I go about discouraging this from happening again? That would probably involve comments and/or relationships between works; I've heard these mentioned, but have no clue how to use them.

I found a link labelled "Work-only work page"; that seems to provide the mechanics of creating relationships between books. (But I still need to understand best practices.)

--

Also, for the convenience of anyone who checks this thread because they have the same needs - the option to separate books from a work is on the "editions" page, not the "work details" page.

I keep missing that link, expecting this to be on a page with "work" in its name. (I guess I'm a slow learner, but I'm probably not much worse than average ;-))

Also, each time I combined books that referred to a single volume of this series, the system then suggested the two-volume work and some of the other single-volume works as candidates for combining. (No, they weren't on my workbench.)

Would creating relationships between all 4 remaining works encourage the software to stop making this bad suggestion?

>3 ArlieS: Nope - but it will block people from combining them based on the proposal without first breaking the relationships. That is the only place these come into consideration...

The site makes guesses based on titles, author names and ISBNs and offers things that MAY be the same. With multi-volume works, the problem is always there - so adding the relationship will at least block a well-meaning but clueless member from combining :)

>4 AnnieMod: I've made a contains relationship from the work that contains vol 1 and 2 to the works that are vol 1 and vol 2. There's not much I can do about the work that is volume 3.

Bear in mind that the computer compares the first 20 characters or until it sees a colon (:). Multiple volumes often need sorting out.

Another way to separate editions is to add the work to workbench, open it and separate from there. It enables you to separate more than one at a time, so it's far more convenient when there's more than one to be pulled out

You asked about best practices for stopping miscombinations from happening when adding a book. Sometimes it's unavoidable. If we're the first person to add a particular 'edition' in the autocombiner's eyes: it will apply the matching rules, and if mismatched eg. due to described in >6 MarthaJeanne: all we can do is separate it afterwards.

Being alert to the type of title that is going to fool the autocombiner, like "Shared Title: Unique Part", lets us at least predict autocombine-fails. Or just presume every book you add is going to be miscombined, and check the /editions page after every one. Then the ones that aren't needing cleanup, are a win :-)

Sometimes you will add something and there will be a lot of things to fix, other times the entry will fit in easily. But fixing as much as possible at the time of entering saves hassles later. (Doesn't totally avoid them, but reduces them.)

Obviously some books are going to be more trouble than others. First entry of a translation has to be combined. For that matter, in some cases the author will need combining, too. These multi-volume issues, you just need to deal with. Every time. It's just how it is.