Multiple questions about a Time-Life book (Epic of Flight series)

[Rick]

I just finished adding the missing 19 books to the Time Life series "The Epic of Flight" and noticed several odd things with various volumes so I've listed each question separately below.

Question #1
The Aeronauts lists "Time-Life Books (Contribution by)" in the author space, after the correct author's name. To me this seems incorrect. I own the entire set of 23 books and when I pulled out my copy the title page shows as follows:

by Donald Dale Jackson
and the Editors of Time-Life Books

My question to more experienced Librarians is whether including editors like that when there is already a main author is best practice or not. My opinion is no but before I make any changes I wanted to get a second opinion. This is for the edition here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...


Qustion #2
On the page that shows the three editions of this book one shows as "The Aeronauts (The Epic of flight ; 4)" but when clicking to the details page it shows up simply as "The Aeronauts (The Epic of Flight)" where the series name is a hyperlink to the series page. It shows the title from the search results as the Original Title. Do I need to worry about removing the number and/or series from the original title? None of the volumes that I own in this series have a number (nor have any Time-Life series that I have read in the past). This is also for the same edition as above: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...


Question #3
There is another edition at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6... which has the correct cover image but this one has the author listed as "Donald Dale Jackson, Time-Life Books (Editor)". Again my thought is that since there is a primary author that the editors should be left out, any thoughts on this?


Question #4
The edition at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6... shows that the publisher is Time Life Medical but the edition from the first two questions lists it as Time Life Education. The spine of my book says simply Time-Life Books and the Library of Congress data block inside says the same. I just wanted confirmation that I should change any of these volumes that require it to use Time-Life Books as the publisher.


I can't seem to find any Librarian Notes for the two alternate editions so I'm not quite sure how to handle this one as I can only use my copy as a reference which has a copyright date of 1981 but no other dates listed.

Apologies for the length of this post but I wanted to make sure I was crystal clear before making my first edits as a new Librarian.

[Emy]

#1 I would verify with the manual, but usually Corporate authors are only listed when a specific named person is not known / listed.

#2 Two points here.
- In the Title field, inside of () the series can either be listed as (SERIES NAME, #1) etc. OR as just (SERIES NAME).
- On the series page, series can be listed numerically or not as appropriate. This series does not have numbers, therefore the hyperlink from the Book record page just shows the title. If there was numbering, then the number would also show in the link.

#3 The general rule with Editors is that they are only listed for A) Multi-author volumes, or B) Editions of certain classics.

#4 The listing inside the book is the one to go with - many feeds end up with errors because the book data was "fixed" later. This is particularly common with publishing houses that merge or are taken over by others...

[Rick]

Thanks for the feedback, it was helpful but I thought I'd do a little back and forth before touching the existing data.

#1 and #3 I referenced the author page in the manual and my interpretation is that since it has a primary author and the other one listed isn't even a person but a group that the Editors should be removed. I have a lot of data collation to do first however since I want to make all 23 books in the series use the same format wherever possible.

#2 I will remove the number since it's not shown anywhere in the volume. I don't know if that was the fourth one received by the person who added the book or what. I put the titles in title sort order within the series.

#4 I am still confused, especially since I did some research on the history of the Time-Life Books imprint which hasn't been owned by Time-Life in many years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time%E2%...

I got my books in the late 1980s, publication dates are around 1981-1982 for the series. It's possible that older editions have a different publisher name than mine but IMO that sounds unlikely. I have been reading various Time-Life book series since I was a kid in the 1970s and don't remember seeing any with Medical or Education in the publisher name (and I was a book geek even then since I did read the page with the ISBN and Library of Congress info).

[Emy]

#1 & #3 - Agreed, that's my interpretation too :)

#2 - I sneakily took the number off since it was on incorrectly even if it should be numbered, i,e, it was (SERIESNAME_;_4) instead of (SERIESNAME, #4). If any other editions have that on, feel free to fix!

#4 Entirely possible that older editions have a different publisher, or even that they were released as e.g. "Bodley Head for Time-Life" (using an intentionally improbably example)... Only fix those volumes which you have in front of you, just in case those which LOOK wrong, actually aren't.