Little House

Someone seems to have thought the Series field is where you list all the books in the series. They "fixed" Little House on the Prairie, which had a couple of series listed. Unfortunately, I can't tell in the history what all of them were, and I'm not familiar with those books.

So if someone is familiar with Little House and can restore the field to it's proper contents, have at it!

http://www.librarything.com/work/3962/commonknowledge/32820959

It's fixed now.

ETA: At least, the primary series has been restored. I just realized that there must have been others that were removed from the other books in the primary series as well. So that's fun. Working on it!

ETA2: It should be done now. Explored a bit to make sure I wasn't missing any other series/books, and it looks like there could actually be a good deal of consolidation/clean-up on the books related to Wilder and her family, but the primary series ("Little House: The Laura Years" and "Little House novels, chronological order") should be set.

I'm particularly curious about the Laura Ingalls Wilder Family Series, and what its purpose is, whether it needs to be expanded or deleted. There's also a "Little House" series floating around that could go.

Does anyone object to me taking on some editing/cleanup (read: conduct a thorough overhaul) with the rather large collection of different Little House / Little House novels, chronological order (etc etc) series? Some of the issues brought up by keristars seem to have never been addressed and then ended up migrated over to the new series, and maybe a few several other series have been created in the last 10 years....

First off, there are the originals: http://www.librarything.com/nseries/194/Little-House-The-Laura-Years This makes some sense to be a distinct series from the rest of the Little House books as it just includes the books and letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder herself, but its relationship to series 138 is confusing.
http://www.librarything.com/nseries/138/Little-House is described as "Any and all books by or about, fiction or nonfiction, related to Laura Ingalls Wilder and family," but it has only a couple differences between the "Laura Years" version of the series, and it isn't anywhere nearly as large as series 173, which includes many of the related books about Laura's ancestors and her daughter:
http://www.librarything.com/nseries/173/Little-House-novels-chronological-order

My gut says it would be useful if the umbrella series page (to be housed either in 138 or 173) showed off each of the main character sub-series as a different series group.

I'll also consolidate and standardize the naming of each of the sub-series. For instance, the Rose/Rocky Ridge books are oddly found in both series 2163 (Rose Years) and 3177 (Rocky Ridge Years), except that 3177 doesn't even include all the Rose books with Rocky Ridge in the title, so unless I'm missing something, I don't see why these two series shouldn't be combined...
http://www.librarything.com/nseries/2163/Little-House-The-Rose-Years
http://www.librarything.com/nseries/3177/The-Rocky-Ridge-Years

If anyone has insight into the Laura Ingalls Wilder Family Series and whether there is a compelling reason to keep it separate from what series 138 purports to be, please let me know!

Just keep the Chronological separate from the Publication order series still. We've not been told that's okay to combine.

>3 parlerodermime:

No particular insight into the series, but I endorse your idea to create one umbrella series and one "Laura Years" series. I'd use the chronological order series as the umbrella series, which it is right now. You can probably just combine the "Laura Years" and "Little House" series, and use that to keep the publication order.

On another note, is there any way to get rid of the "no relationship" Wolves series on the sidebar? They are remnants of a misplaced anthology.

Well, I got started.

I combined the two Rose series (2163 and 3177) into Little House: The Rose Years.

I also combined the redundant "Little House (138)" one (after clarifying the description that it ought not include more than the original, which it never had except for 1 biography anyway) into Little House: The Laura Years.

The Martha Years, The Charlotte Years, The Caroline Years, The Laura Years, and The Rose Years are all now related to the Little House novels, chronological order. Each is listed as a subseries, and I added the additional relationship that The Laura Years inspired the larger collection.

I changed the grouping of Little House novels, chronological order. Please note that it is very easy to undo what I've done so far here -- would just need to move stuff back to the core, and the book numbers are still there, so they would automatically sort! Also, the original sorting still holds if you select the "ungrouped" option. Visually, I think it makes it easier to tell where the character focus changes, but I'm not sold on (a) the fact that nothing is in the core anymore, or (b), the way I'm handling books by one-off authors adding to the corpus by including them as "supplementary" to a given generational focus on a specific heroine, because (c) the one-off books originally denoted by decimal point order in between the "real" books then appear in clusters very slightly out of order.

4 gilroy: Despite the large number of series, there wasn't an explicit "publication order" series distinct from the chronological order one, so no worries there. The chronological order is still in good shape (/easily revertable out of the generational groups I added).

5 gabriel: I haven't figured out how to get rid of the "no relationship" wolves stuff. I'm considering adding it so that I can remove the relationship (hoping that's a distinct action from setting the relationship as none), but looking at the edit history, it's hard to tell exactly which action you took on Aug 31, 2020 that resulted in not being able to see an editable relationship with the wolves and tripod series. Since it's possible to define two relationships between the same series (e.g., broad Little House was "inspired by" and "contains the subseries" Little House: Laura Years), I'm not sure what I try would actually override the no-relationship relationship.

>6 parlerodermime:

I like what you've done.

The way the overlaps were removed was by taking out all the series attributions the anthology had. Perhaps if we re-create the overlaps by (wrongly) assigning a book into the other series, we can remove the relationship properly (or redefine the relationship, then remove it?)? I don't have time to try to work it out today.

>7 gabriel:

Yay, glad you like it so far :)

So, bad news, apparently it's possible to simultaneously "have no relationship with" another series while also being a subseries of it. I attempted adding a book from the Tripods series to Little House to attempt to redefine/remove the series connection, and removing only removed the new relationship I just created. Then I attempted a fully manual relationship addition, and similarly, removing it had no impact on the prior "no relationship" relationship. I can't figure out where those are hidden.

Just to clarify, you're saying the anthology, by which I assume you're referring to The Complete Little House Nine-Book Set, originally had incorrect series affiliations to Wolves Chronicles / The Tripods (possibly one inherited through the other, as I see a notice on their pages that they also have nothing to do with each other), which caused a message about "overlapping" series, and then that series relationship was set to "no relation" (8/31 edit) instead of removed, and that made the relationship un-editable? Maybe if I try again with the particular book that accomplished the error in the first place, it'll become a removable relationship.

EDIT: Or was it the fault of Illustrated Treasury of Modern Literature for Children? Just looking back over the series edit page again for clues.

>8 parlerodermime:

Yep, it was the Illustrated Treasury that did it. I think some of the series were already set to "no relation" when I got there, but I'm sure I tried "no relation" once or twice to try to solve the problem before just taking out the series relationships in the Illustrated Treasury.

>9 gabriel: Hard to believe someone actually added the Illustrated Treasury to the series in the first place. Was it an implicit series inclusion due to the new-series conversion and the fact that the Illustrated Treasury has a work relationship of "being an abridgement of Little House on the Prairie" despite containing an abridgement being something different?

I've done some searching of the Talk threads and haven't found anyone that solved this issue. When you first encountered the non-editable non-relationship, it was only a 10-day old feature or so. Given that it was rolled out separately from the new series feature, it's seeming more and more like a bug, or that something is lacking in the display implementation. Still, even if the original idea was to use it to suppress irrelevant information from the series page, it seems shortsighted not to make it editable.

My best guess is that the view suppression is implemented incorrectly, so it's suppressed from / invisible on the series relationship editor while remaining even more annoying to look at as clutter on the main series page. I added a comment over in the thread where the feature was announced, but it probably makes sense to file an official bug report if we can't figure out a different workaround.

>10 parlerodermime: The Illustrated Treasury was added to more than a dozen series. Another editor added the work-to-work relationships after we deleted all the series ascriptions. In fact, we didn't know it only contained extracts until my co-worker on the problem found an image of the dustwrapper description.

I'm afraid that the technical aspect of this as you describe it makes vague sense to me, but I don't really know enough about these kinds of things to have an informed opinion. I do agree a bug report would be the logical next step.

>11 gabriel: That must have been frustrating. There's really no reason for that to have ever been added to a series.

Anyway, I reported it here.

Do you (or does anyone reading this) have any thoughts on keeping Laura Ingalls Wilder Family Series as its own separate series, or instead incorporating it as a subgroup of the main umbrella Little House series? Perhaps by adding the Little House in the Ozarks: The Rediscovered Writings into the same subsection as Laura's diaries and letters and rename it "The Laura Years (Letters, journals, and other writings)" and then including the two William Anderson books in the Laura years (supplement) group, which makes at least a little sense since there's a Mary book in there already, or instead creating yet another sub-group for them?

>12 parlerodermime:: Thanks very much for reporting the bug.

The Family Series doesn't look like a true series to me at all. I was going to say it doesn't look like a publisher series, but the edition data shows it is. I'll move it to a publisher series.

I was thinking that perhaps the two William Anderson books were a true series, but we don't usually create series between non-fiction books by same author merely because they cover related subjects, unless it's explicitly a series. Here, because the rediscovered writings (edited by someone else) are part of the series, I think we can say with a high degree of confidence that it's a publisher series.

The "Little House in the Ozarks" title looks like it could be separately added to the Letters, journals etc. section, but I'll leave that to your judgement. I tend to think that that kind of stuff isn't really part of the series - just related materials - but if we don't have a better way of describing the relationships, perhaps this is the best solution. I'm not sure what the limit is: should Shakespeare's Henry VI have all the commentaries included in the series? I would think not, but I'm not sure what the policy is.