Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
Policies & Practices
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Nomenclature: Vol. vs Volume in title
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I've wondered the same thing. So far what I've done is use the format as it appears in the title of that edition (where applicable) and for the parenthetical series information I follow the example (series title, #1).
I don't think there's a rule or guideline about this. I use whatever's on the cover, if it is in fact on the cover.
If there's already several editions of the volume I'm editing, or other volumes, using one style, I'll use that.
If the existing volumes are quite inconsistent, or I'm the one adding them all, I also prefer "Vol. #".
I don't bother editing existing volumes though, unless I already have to for some other reason - to fix a series, or I'm editing half of them anyway to get the edition info out or whatever. But I'll sometimes normalise them to whatever is most common if there's only one or two that are outliers, e.g. when there are 8 editions saying Volume 1, and 7 editions saying Volume 2 and one that says Vol. 2, I'd probably change that last one, just because it suits my sense of orderliness. If there were 5 one way and 3 the other for Volume 1, and 4 each way for volume 2, I'd likely just leave them be.
Mod
There is not.
Whenever I add an edition or book, I tend to go with Vol. as it saves space in the title field while getting the necessary information across (as many times the word volume is implied on the cover). My question then is, which is more acceptable? If a series is entirely one way (volume or vol.) is it alright to change all of them to one or the other or should it just conform to whatever was previously there? I guess I just want to avoid a war of changing back and forth.