Messed up when tried to use Series! Help!!

Hi,

I'm new here and have just been adding some books the past days.
Today I started to add a book series that contains 14 books.
So, I was thinking this might be what "Series" here on LT is for?

I don't really understand how these functions work... I hope I dint mess it up to bad?
I believe I created a Work and then started to add the books.
All of a sudden one book didn't got added to the Work so I tried to press "Separate"...

Now I can't get it to work.. I tried to separate everything again but there is still that Work connected somewhere?
When I add a new book now, it gets connected to the previous book when I look at the Work column in the "Your books" page.

How can I undo this Work and Series stuff?

You haven't told us what work(s) and series you have a problem with, Your account is private so we can't see it. That makes it impossible to know how to help you.

But a Work is not a series, except when the books are published in one volume or maybe one boxed set. A work is all the editions of one book.

Searching through the last 72 hours of helper activity, I think >1 TELJET: was talking about this series:

Specialisten : hemmets medicinska uppslagsbok.

The works were (mostly) correctly separated, and the Series had been created, though no Works had been added to it. I've now gone ahead and done that.

Teljemo, one issue you're running into is that LibraryThing's autocombiner combines together bundles of title-author-isbn, but it only looks at the first twenty characters of the title (or until a colon) before lumping things together. Not something you could have known, but it is fixable, and it's an easy fix (you've been doing some successful separating already). If you add more volumes in the series, and they still attach to the wrong work, post back and we'll help you sort it out.

Thanks all :)

#2 MarthaJeanne
I made made my account public now. Sorry!

#3 Aquila
I mentioned I was new here but I forgot to tell you I'm new in the book collecting world to. I tried to follow a guide that said something about creating a series via works. Thank you for the explanation.

#4 Petroglyph
Awesome! Yes that is the series I was talking about.
Thank you for the assistance.

-----------
So now...
If I look at the series page, It says I have 13 books and 12 works in this series.
There is one row at the bottom that doesn't have a number. I think that was me creating a new series... (It also says "0 copies" on that row and it doesn't have a checkmark.)
Example:
"Specialisten : hemmets medicinska uppslagsbok : Band 1 2 copies"
"Specialisten : hemmets medicinska uppslagsbok 0 copies"
I only have 12 books in this series as of now. No. 1 to 12 but two copies of No. 1 and missing No. 2

What is that Thing hiding in my Library? Is that what you would call a LibraryThing? ;)

>5 TELJET:

"13 books and 12 works" -- that is LT-speak for "your catalogue contains 13 individual items from this series, but only 12 show up on this page." Seems like that is correct: you own two copies of volume one, no copies of volume 2, one copy of volumes 3 through 12, and your catalogue also contains an entry with volumes "2 + 13 - 14" (I assume those are the ones you do not physically own?) -- that adds up to 13 books and 12 works.

(There is no need to add books you don't own to the website just for the sake of making a Series page complete.)

As for the row with zero copies at the bottom: I could not find a series number in the metadata for that item, so I didn't add one. A zero-copy work means that it is a "ghost" copy -- it is data that someone added to the website, but then subsequent combining / separating meant that this particular bundle of data got detached from a work. The fix is to combine it with the right work that does have copies on the website, so that future entries with the exact same data as the zero-copy work get autocombined with the correct work. In this case, I would probably remove the Series info from that entry so that it doesn't show up on the Series page any more.

Petroglyph (#6):

(There is no need to add books you don't own to the website just for the sake of making a Series page complete.)

I believe Tim would probably frown on this practice as he does that of adding short stories just for the sake of making Contains complete, but it would be fine to add them to a wishlist or similar to track which books you're missing. And then add them to the series.

I'll summarize. (For myself mostly, to get an overview of this thing)
Correct me if I'm wrong anywhere.

* I have 12 actual books in this "series".
* I have 2 different prints of volume 1 and they are each registered as separate books. (I've seen you can add copies in the book edit and I guess that is if you have exact copies of the same book, wish this is not.)
* I'm missing volume 2.
* I have added a dummy book labeled as volume 2,13,14 in my Wishlist as a reminder to add them here in full later.
* My volumes: 1,1,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12 (=12)

So, since LT is also looking in my Wishlist and are adding that dummy book, it makes it seem as I have 13 books and 12 works.
Is there a way to tell LT to ignore items in the Wishlist collection when combining a "series"?

-----------------

-About the "the row with zero copies at the bottom"
How do I remove that series from that entry?

-Next time I'm adding a collection of books with several volumes.
Do I just ignore this whole series thing? Will they find their way by themselves?

-A work or not?
One book is a work. Several editions of the same book is a work. One complete encyclopedia made up of several different volumes is a work but each volume itself is not.
But, I have a couple of old novels with matching covers and numbered volumes. However, each book is from a different author. Is this collection still a work? (Like if a publisher republishes books in a series like this for people to get matching books in the shelf?)

-Also...
Is there any formatting options for these discussion posts? Like bold text, bullet list and so on? Looked around for info about formatting and syntax but couldn't find any.

Thanks for helping a beginner book collector out :)

In many cases it just depends how you enter the books. If you enter each volume separately, each volume is a work.

For your set of novels, the most useful thing is probably to enter each separately so that they each end up in the appropriate work. (You may need to manually combine them.) If you want, you could then create a publisher's series to mark that they belong together.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/177029#n8103572

>8 TELJET: Dummy book shouldn't be a part of the series. Perhaps it ended up combined with sth already in the series, in which case you just need to separate it

>10 SandraArdnas:

I was the one who added that dummy book ("vols 2+13+14") to the series -- before I knew what it was, so I bunged it into the collections section. I haven't bothered to fix it. Ideally, OP adds three items to their wishlist, one for each volume missing from their collection.