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stoutfellowLast year, when I began putting together my library database, one of my goals was to distinguish between Volumes - physical books - and Works - individual, self-contained pieces of writing, which might appear in more than one Volume. I'm in the process of "subcataloging" my library, recording which Works appear in which Volumes. This is a rather more tangled task than I expected, and I'm going to mumble and grumble about it under the cut. Feel free not to look.
The point of the distinction is fairly straightforward. A particular Work - say, a poem by Emily Dickinson - might appear in several different places in my library. On the other hand, a single Work, like The Lord of the Rings, might take up multiple Volumes, complete only in their union. I might have an excerpt from a scientific paper here, a different excerpt there, and the whole thing in yet another place; I want to be able to keep track of things like this.
This presents some obvious bits of tedium. When I get to The Complete Poems of Keats and Shelley, I will damn well record every single poem, fragment, piece of juvenilia, and editorial comment by Mrs. Shelley. This I am prepared to do.
Keeping track of titles is a bit of a problem, too. The Annals of America is a twenty-some-volume anthology of documents pertaining to the history of the United States. Each of the documents has a title in the volume, but in many cases this is not the title the document had in the original. (Many didn't have titles at all; I record them as, e.g., "Speech in the Senate, July 23, 1831".) I prepared for this as well. My database has a "Works" table, a "Volumes" table, and a "Locations" table linking them, and one field of that last table is "Title in Volume".
(Titles are a problem in another way, too. Should Homer's great poem on the Trojan War be The Iliad, or Ilias? I'm currently trying to go with titles in the original language, if I can find them. One of my books is a German reader, with writings from many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German writers; unfortunately, my German isn't good enough for me to tell, without closer examination, which are excerpts and which are complete works. I mean, Prometheus / Der erste Akt is pretty obvious, but others are less so.)
Things get sticky with volumes like The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. The translator/editor has organized many of them into coherent pieces, but several sections are catch-alls like "Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations". I decided (with a tiny bit of misgiving) to leave those sections as Works rather than listing every single maxim.
What's bugging me right now is Forever After, by Zelazny et al. It's a braided novel - four separate stories, plus an overarching frame, all by different authors. I can't decide whether to divide it into multiple Works, or treat it as a single Work with multiple authors. If I do the latter, I have to justify - at least in my own mind - treating Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso separately (as I intend to do), given that Ariosto was explicitly continuing Boiardo's (unfinished?) work. I'm sure I can come up with a justification, but the lack of neatness offends my ordinological soul.
I'm only about ten percent of the way through my library, and there will undoubtedly be other problems of this nature that I haven't foreseen. Why am I doing this, again?
The point of the distinction is fairly straightforward. A particular Work - say, a poem by Emily Dickinson - might appear in several different places in my library. On the other hand, a single Work, like The Lord of the Rings, might take up multiple Volumes, complete only in their union. I might have an excerpt from a scientific paper here, a different excerpt there, and the whole thing in yet another place; I want to be able to keep track of things like this.
This presents some obvious bits of tedium. When I get to The Complete Poems of Keats and Shelley, I will damn well record every single poem, fragment, piece of juvenilia, and editorial comment by Mrs. Shelley. This I am prepared to do.
Keeping track of titles is a bit of a problem, too. The Annals of America is a twenty-some-volume anthology of documents pertaining to the history of the United States. Each of the documents has a title in the volume, but in many cases this is not the title the document had in the original. (Many didn't have titles at all; I record them as, e.g., "Speech in the Senate, July 23, 1831".) I prepared for this as well. My database has a "Works" table, a "Volumes" table, and a "Locations" table linking them, and one field of that last table is "Title in Volume".
(Titles are a problem in another way, too. Should Homer's great poem on the Trojan War be The Iliad, or Ilias? I'm currently trying to go with titles in the original language, if I can find them. One of my books is a German reader, with writings from many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German writers; unfortunately, my German isn't good enough for me to tell, without closer examination, which are excerpts and which are complete works. I mean, Prometheus / Der erste Akt is pretty obvious, but others are less so.)
Things get sticky with volumes like The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. The translator/editor has organized many of them into coherent pieces, but several sections are catch-alls like "Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations". I decided (with a tiny bit of misgiving) to leave those sections as Works rather than listing every single maxim.
What's bugging me right now is Forever After, by Zelazny et al. It's a braided novel - four separate stories, plus an overarching frame, all by different authors. I can't decide whether to divide it into multiple Works, or treat it as a single Work with multiple authors. If I do the latter, I have to justify - at least in my own mind - treating Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso separately (as I intend to do), given that Ariosto was explicitly continuing Boiardo's (unfinished?) work. I'm sure I can come up with a justification, but the lack of neatness offends my ordinological soul.
I'm only about ten percent of the way through my library, and there will undoubtedly be other problems of this nature that I haven't foreseen. Why am I doing this, again?
