Volume numbers & series entries for Time-Life books?

[Rick]

I have been working on cleaning up a couple of Time-Life series and discovered that some books have a volume number listed. For example Partisans and Guerillas had the following title until I cleaned it up a moment ago: "Time Life World War II, Vol. 12: Partisans and Guerillas".

Since I have been on the receiving side of several series from Time-Life going back 30 years my impression is that when you subscribed to a series you weren't necessarily shipped a specific volume #1 first, you kind of just got what you got. I can't find any evidence that there are volume numbers for these books and in the two series that I currently have in my possession (World War II and The Epic of Flight) none of the books lists a volume number anywhere.

Is it acceptable to remove the volume numbers on these and just note what they were in my Librarian Note?

[Cait]

Yes, I would think so. I've never known those Time-Life series to have volume numbers either.

[Rick]

I just discovered that there are two distinct series, one of which has the correct number of books in it already (39) here: http://www.goodreads.com/series/10610...

I had been working with a different series since it happened to be the first one I clicked on from one of the books here:
http://www.goodreads.com/series/10610...

The series I have been working with only had 14 books in it and I discovered that there were multiple duplicate entries for lots of the books so this series currently has 52 books listed. This is down from the initial 64 as I work through the duplicates.

The biggest problem that I have found is that some of the books have the author listed as "Time Life Books" when in fact there is a specific author that should be listed. Since I have all 39 books in my possession I was planning on updating the Time Life entries to the correct author name and then combining the duplicates.

One question I do have is whether two different versions of the same series are acceptable? I am thinking that I just leave that one alone and continue to use the second URL to help me clean up the problem listings. Since a book can only belong to one series at a time (at least I think that is how it works) I could run into trouble.

Has anyone dealt with duplicate series before? If so how would you suggest I handle this situation?

[Cait]

Books can be in multiple series -- that's not a problem. (You'll see only one next to the book title on the book's page, but you can see all of them in the details section.) There's no need to have the same series twice, but it shouldn't be a problem if you're just using it temporarily to hold onto the books you're editing. Just be sure to delete the duplicate when you're done.

[Rick]

Well I'll be, I read more fine print in my copy of Across the Rhine and found this:

(World War II; v.22)

After spot-checking several volumes it looks like maybe the volumes published before 1979 don't have this info, in fact they don't even have the current indicia format at all (which is where the volume number is buried).

My dilemma now is whether to add the series & volume number in the Title per the Manual or maybe add it in the Description field instead. My thought was that if any of the volumes don't have the volume number available then none of them should have the number in the title. Suggestions?

[rivka, Former Moderator]

If the numbering is consistent (that is, if all volumes of Across the Rhine which have any number have the same number), then they should be numbered on the series page. And in numbered order.

Adding the number to the title line manually is optional.

[Rick]

Thanks for the suggestions and for making some edits on the books also. I will just stay away from the numbers since I don't have a way to validate data integrity.