Title Formatting for Books in Multiple Series

[Melanie]

What is the policy on title formatting for books in multiple series?

1. Book ABC (Series A, #1; Series B, #2)

or

2. Book ABC (Series A, #1) (Series B, #2)

I didn't see anything specific in the manual about this (but maybe I missed it?).

I've been formatting the title the first way and noticed another librarian has been changing them to the second way. Is that the way it's supposed to be? Or is this all a personal preference thing? I just wanted to know if I'm formatting everything wrong.

Thanks!

[Dobby]

I've been using the formatting in your first example, based on this discussion:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

It's an older discussion, but it was the most recent information I could find when I was researching the same question.

[Krazykiwi]

I prefer the first, because if you do the latter, only the final set of parentheses is replaced by the series link, and it looks very messy.

Actually this came up quite recently again (in the last six months at least), and I believe the consensus then was also to put them all in one set of parentheses, but I can't find that discussion to confirm my memory.

(eta side note: This kind of stuff bugs me more than it probably should. Librarian wise, it's bad form and pretty much a waste of time reformatting someone elses work to a personal preference, so whoever is doing that probably shouldn't. I'll merrily correct info that is formatted incorrectly or against policy, but when it's correct(ish) but not "how I like it" I wouldn't, unless I have another reason to be editing a particular field. I mean, I could spend years fixing all the "Harper Collins Publishers" to say HarperCollins, but what's the point?

I once spent most of a weekend fixing up a huge series where every book had 20-30 editions and multiple translations, only to have someone come along about a week later and edit every single one of them to remove the comma in the series part of the title LOL. I was like "where were you when it was a huge mess a week ago?)

[lethe]

There was this topic: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
but there was no official answer. Everybody seems to agree though that option 1 (all in one set of parentheses) is the most clean and logical.

Krazykiwi wrote: "I once spent most of a weekend fixing up a huge series where every book had 20-30 editions and multiple translations, only to have someone come along about a week later and edit every single one of them to remove the comma in the series part of the title LOL."

Heh, I once came across someone whose edits consisted of adding a space before the colon in title fields. At least your helpful friend's edits weren't incorrect. :P

[Melanie]

I've started reverting the changes they made. When I saw some of the books on my shelves, they looked terrible due to the multiple sets of parentheses. It was also causing the series names to show up multiple times.

Example:

They had it listed as "All I Ever Need Is You (Seattle Sullivans, #6) (The Sullivans, #14)" in the title field which caused it to show as "All I Ever Need Is You (Seattle Sullivans, #6) (Seattle Sullivans, #6) (The Sullivans, #14)" on my shelves and the book page.

I've changed it to "All I Ever Need Is You (Seattle Sullivans, #6; The Sullivans, #14)" which looks so much nicer on my shelves and on the book page itself as the entire list of series disappears to become a link.