Extend the list of 'works I own' using the 'contains' relationship

As an example, I own Our Ancestors by Italo Calvino. This work contains the following three works: The Baron in the Trees, The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount. How wondeful would it be when these three works would also be checked (with a separate color checkmark) in the list of works on the author page in the 'Works by Italo Calvino' section. The information is already available in the LT database and imho this would facilitate finding unowned works by the author.

>1 PaKo64: Yes!! I’d like that too.

I would love this! I think it will take the canonical two weeks! So I have added all the included works I care about in a "omnibus parts" collection. sigh.

>3 al.vick: I've done that for many of mine.

It's been suggested as part of extending series checkmarks and so on. It does rely on the work-to-work relationship being present but if it forces people into entering the relationships then so much the better. It would be great for when you have some of the series as stand-alones and others as the omnibus. Where you have both - then stand-alone should take precedence.

Mind you, one headache is comic book series where there are both individual issues and collections and it's not always obvious which is which. When I was logging our floppies last year, I had to do a major clean up of editions where #2-#5 were owned by a handful of members and #1 was owned by several hundred or thousand members. Turned out Issue 1 was auto-combined with Volume 1...

+1 although I’d like a different coloured tick mark for transitive ownership.

I believe something similar was requested more than once and each time there's quite a few people enthusiastically in favor, so here's to hoping it will eventually make it to the LT to-do list.

Personally, I would also add the desire to be able to rate and review such works.

>6 djryan: transitive ownership

+1 to that neologism

>8 elenchus: One of the few understandable online explanations of transitive ownership appears to be:

"This is a case when User A is a member of Group A and Group A is the owner of Group B. User A is now the owner of Group B. This is called nested ownership, or transitive ownership if you are a fan of discrete mathematics."

I am a member of our household (Group A), which owns our merged library (Group B). However I think everyone would quibble with that making me being the owner of Group B; "an owner" perhaps, when my better-half's out and the dog's asleep.

This looks like an expansion of this existing request:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/290364

Following with GREAT interest …

>6 djryan: I’d like a different coloured tick mark for transitive ownership.

Let me agree on both counts. I think transitive ownership is good -- but it should be acknowledged that sometimes transitive ownership will cause a user to be credited with books the user would not ordinarily buy.

I'll give an example from my library -- probably not the best one, but the first one my eye fell upon. I am not a particular fan of C. S. Lewis -- in fact, I generally dislike him. But there are a few of his books I like: The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, Till We Have Faces.

I have a volume, The Best of C. S. Lewis, which contains both Screwtape and The Great Divorce -- plus other works that I don't want to be blamed for. :-) I keep it because it was cheaper than two individual volumes.

So I would like to know that I have Screwtape, but I don't particularly want to be "blamed" for owning Miracles. Having transitive ownership (or hierarchical ownership) would solve one problem (that my library doesn't include Screwtape) without distorting it by making it appear I sought out Miracles. :-)

I’m currently “blamed” for a number of works I’d never sought out but someone saw fit to gift me.

But then I regard my catalogue as a reflection of what I own, not of my literary tastes or something if the sort.

>13 AndreasJ: I’m currently “blamed” for a number of works I’d never sought out but someone saw fit to gift me.

But then I regard my catalogue as a reflection of what I own, not of my literary tastes or something if the sort.

Agreed, actually -- but by having a hierarchical system, you get the better of the two worlds. :-) And, in my case, my library does have a secondary use, besides cataloging what I own: It lets people know if I have certain scholarly works available. But that means they can poke around and get a false impression of what I have.

Perhaps you should make up a collection for gift books.

>14 waltzmn: Perhaps you should make up a collection for gift books.

Apart from the fact I’m not sure what good it’d do, there’d be the practical problem that for substantial number of older books, I simply don’t recall if I bought them myself or got them as presents.

>12 waltzmn: Maybe I'm having trouble understanding this concern because our catalog is comprehensive and expansive, not mindful of others' potential reference, use, or just poking around. If you in fact have the anthology The Best of C. S. Lewis in your catalog, don't you necessarily have a "work" that includes The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and Miracles, regardless of which contents or thinking led you to get, catalog, and keep the work? (I haven't looked but presume you cataloged TBoCSL as such; alternatively, you might catalog TSL and TGD separately, but then you'd lose both identification of the anthology in your catalog and any "contained in" feature for its individual contents.) There are certainly things in our catalog that don't reflect who we are, for whatever reasons (largely inertia?); but I don't see such reflections as motivating factors in my LT membership or activity. I'd welcome knowing more about your collection and uses in this regard.

>16 jasbro: Maybe I'm having trouble understanding this concern because our catalog is comprehensive and expansive, not mindful of others' potential reference, use, or just poking around. If you in fact have the anthology The Best of C. S. Lewis in your catalog, don't you necessarily have a "work" that includes The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and Miracles, regardless of which contents or thinking led you to get, catalog, and keep the work?

I may be having trouble understanding your concern, too. To be sure this is clear, I have The Best of C. S. Lewis; I do not have a volume that is labelled The Screwtape Letters or The Great Divorce.

I want two things:
1. For reasons of physical cataloging, I want to know that I have The Best of C. S. Lewis.
2. For reasons of logical cataloging, I want to know that I have The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce.

Notice that these are separate goals. Right now, LT does the former; it does not do the latter except via work-to-work relationships -- certainly too much for a person who does not use LT to understand. The goal would be to do both.

But now note another problem: Suppose we just did a simple inheritance, and LT said I had a copy of Screwtape. Then someone looking through my library might look for Screwtape -- and not find it, because I do not have that particular volume. I have a copy of the text, but I do not have that book.

By having a two-level hierarchy, LibraryThing could supply both those needs.

There are other psychological issues, which is what I was talking about, but the argument for having inheritance of books does not depend on the psychology. It depends only on the need for both physical and logical cataloging.

If that satisfies you, you can stop there.

But I have a much more complicated example. This is not a big problem with Lewis, because Lewis's "works" are pretty clearly defined. It is far less clear with my Middle English books. Take a specific example, St. Erkenwald. It has been proposed that it is by the Gawain Poet/Pearl Poet. Some believe it; others do not. So I have one volume that includes it with the works of the Gawain Poet: The Complete Works of the Gawain-Poet. I also have it in an anthology, The Owl and the nightingale ; Cleanness ; St. Erkenwald. I have a different Gawain Poet anthology, containing only the universally recognized works: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight / Patience / Pearl: Verse Translations. I have multiple editions of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; I have an edition of Pearl. I have J. R. R. Tolkien's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. And so on... I won't get into my editions of Sir Orfeo.... I also have a critical edition of The Owl and the Nightingale: A facsimile of Jesus College Oxford MS. 29 and British Museum MS. Cott (Early English Text Society Original Series) that LT seems to mis-catalog and I haven't managed to straighten out because this is such a mess....

Now: Suppose someone comes in and wants to know if I have St. Erkenwald. Yes... but not in a specific volume. And one of the two copies -- the good one, that's close to the original Middle English -- doesn't have St. Erkenwald in the title. And figuring out the above mess is not easy at all.

So it would really help to have a multi-layer system.

>17 waltzmn: Thanks for your reply. I now see, I'm gonna hafta poke around in your library a bit! :D

Bump

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+1

bump

Requesting icons (checkmarks, ticks, or otherwise) to indicate unowned works that are contained in owned works, e.g. Max Eastman’s Enjoyment of Poetry (1913), contained in Eastman’s Enjoyment of Poetry with Other Essays in Aesthetics (1939), in turn contained in Eastman’s Enjoyment of Poetry, with Anthology for Enjoyment of Poetry (1951). See also: https://www.librarything.com/topic/341559#7829057, https://www.librarything.com/topic/341559#7829267, and https://www.librarything.com/topic/341559#7829436

>23 jasbro:
I'd like this, and I think it would be widely appreciated. When I have wished for such a mark in the past, I have thought of it as a "virtually in library" mark.

>24 paradoxosalpha: https://www.librarything.com/topic/349171#n8088181

Bumping. I think of this as "implicit" ownership.

I would LOVE this feature, especially if it were its own distinct color for checkmarks when browsing author's works, series pages, etc (and then you could click the work to see what work relationship means that it is implicitly part of your library). Would be SO helpful.

Currently, I (very occasionally) add works to a collection I titled "implicit ownership" as a reminder that something is part of an anthology, so I don't need to prioritize buying a solo copy (but still be able to have my own notes and tags associated with the work rather than the anthology). Being able to re-discover what I already own based on other helpers' contributions to work relationships would be fantastic.

Value Example: Especially in the context of romance anthologies, I usually buy them for a particular reason, and I don't usually read the whole thing front to back. I may not realize I already own something that's related to another series I discover months later. It's not like I think to check all random anthologies, so I might have a book on hold at the library for ages only to realize, "hey, I actually have access to read this already."

On a different note, it would nearly entirely eliminate the controversial practice of adding anthologies to multiple series where only one work is relevant to each series and the works are unrelated. It really muddies the "series relationship" data, which I care enough to edit, even when it is a pain to go back and dismiss "this series overlaps with this series" notices when I'm not the person who added them and have to do research to figure out what book is triggering the overlap notice and if there is a possibility of a true overlap or not.

>26 parlerodermime: The "contains" only works for anthologies if the individual stories have their own entries as titles though. So that won't really solve the issues with anthologies in series - people will continue to do so for their own purposes (see their own book with all the series on it in their catalog for example (and other people will kick them out occasionally).

What it will solve though are omnibuses and people not buying the same book 4 times ;) But for the stories, it will be a hit and miss - depending on someone actually having added the stories first in their catalog (and we are not supposed to do that just so that we can have a contains relationship set properly).

>27 AnnieMod: I'd agree with you about the limited benefit except that in practice the vast majority (at least the ones I run across and fix, which I admit is a subset of works based on my reading/browsing preferences) of anthology collections that get added to series that end up screwing up the "series overlap" information are for ebook anthologies with multiple full-length works where the works also appear on LibraryThing. Here are a few examples where the "contains" relationships are comprehensive...
https://www.librarything.com/work/28069085/book/234348105
https://www.librarything.com/work/29580099/book/234348649
https://www.librarything.com/work/27823321/book/217153390
If there were an "implicit ownership" check, there truly would not be a reason to add these anthologies to series. As it stands, I have personally benefited from moranmc's work on anthologies in series -- there've been a few times I started reading a series I thought I only had the free series starter for, went to the series page to figure out a reading order, and then saw I already owned more than half the series split across different anthologies.

Would it be cleaner with checkmarks? Yes, absolutely since the anthologies aren't actually themselves part of the series. But I'm not going to get into an edit war when moranmc's data entry helps me too. I get why they do it, and I think it's a value add on net.

That said, I previously proposed that there be a built-in category for series works (https://www.librarything.com/topic/345778): instead of classing works as being part of "core" and "collections and selections" with the option to customize for more complicated series, have a classification whereupon works that are put into that section are included in counts + people being able to glance at how much of the series they have access to read, BUT DON'T INFLUENCE series authorship or series-to-series relationships.

>28 parlerodermime: Oh, I don't disagree about anthologies (and collections and omnibuses...) not having a place in a series unless the whole of them is in a series. But that specific proposal will not solve it completely - that's all I am saying :)

>30 parlerodermime: No worries, I think we're pretty much on the same page. Perhaps I'm overly optimistic that the implicit library checkmark would make as much of a difference as I imagine (80%? 90%?) in the series data. Not accidentally rebuying a book I own 3 times already would be nice though.

Bump

I went digging - the first request I could find for this was twelve years ago, on the day that work relationships were introduced.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/109724#2512273

It's quite probable that people had previously mentioned it as a reason for wanting work relationships in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like it too, but I'm not holding my breath.

+1

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