Am I Doing Something Wrong? Sorting and Cataloging General Questions

I am new to LibraryThing but not cataloging and I am having some issues when I go to sort titles in my library. I have them set up where it is Series Title Book #: The Title (i.e. Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Book 1: Guilty Pleasures) since I have a smaller collection I figure that is the easiest way for me to keep track of series. However, when I sort by the title it never sorts them in order. I understand why it will put 10, 11, 12, etc. after 1 and 20, 21, 22, etc. after 2 but the ones that aren't sorting correctly will go 2, 4, 5, 6, 1, 3, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. I thought maybe I had an extra/no space after the colon, thought there might be a space at the beginning of the title, or at the end of the title but none of these seem to be the problem. Any ideas?

Also, I have noticed that when I change call numbers, ISBN, Publishers, etc. the changes never take effect. Should I scrap importing books and just manually enter items? I rather not since I am over 100 titles in already but if I gotta then that is okay too.

I don't see the problem you describe. Here's a view of your catalog, sorted by title:
https://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=Sammeh_Sama&shelf=list&sor...

Your decision to incorporate series name and number into individual book titles makes me shudder, I'm afraid. I'm often stripping series names out of book titles where they appear from Amazon data, for example. But one of the nice things about LibraryThing is that it allows us each that choice in our own catalogs, and still connects our data through shared identifiers.

>2 paradoxosalpha: I may remove them as time goes on but right now it is the easiest way to keep track of which books belong with each other and which ones I am missing. I shelf by Author, then Series, and then book number because otherwise it drives me bonkers that book 5 comes before book 1 alphabetically.

>2 paradoxosalpha: I wish I could show you a screenshot of what is happening. Even clicking your link it does the exact same thing.

Make sure the series names are exactly the same on all books. For example, you have “The Hollows” on some and “The Hollow” on others.

Also. Depending on how you added the book, you may have the sort characters different between the books - LT will try to assist when you add from a source. So if the book did not start with The but the series does or vice versa and you do not fix that, they will get out of whack. Edit the book (the pencil on the far right) and look at the number next to the title. I suspect that you have a mix of 5 (which will ignore the leading the) and (start) or blank which will sort from the first character in the series that do not sort properly. That will throw the series out of order. :) looking at the Hollows series, that’s exactly what happened.

Try adding leading zeros to the series index so the numbers in the series are the same number of characters. Basically, you're sorting the full text of the titles, not the series name and the series index separately.

>5 AnnieMod: I figured it had something to do with sourcing and I didn't know about those numbers. I will have to go through and double check everything. That helps a lot! Thanks!

>6 Maddz: I will definitely try that. Thanks for the info.

>7 Sammeh_Sama: The second and third books of Shades of Magic are sorting with the As, so I'm fairly certain you'll see a "3" in that edit field next to your book titles. The first book of the series probably won't have any number there, because it's somewhere in the later pages, maybe as an S title.

I think Annie guessed correctly and you'll have your titles fixed soon by checking that character (letter and space) field.

>9 aspirit: >5 AnnieMod: Yep that was the problem. I didn't know about those numbers and once I went through and verified that they were correct everything seems to be sorted properly now. Now I just have to go through each title and verify that the imported info is the correct info for the edition I have. Thanks for the help!

That sort character value is really a strange little secret, and conversations like this seem to be the main way that people find out about it.

>11 paradoxosalpha: It's helpful but not knowing about it can make a new user a bit batty. Now that I know about it and how it works it's a handy little thing but I probably spent at least an hour fiddling with Titles and Authors and other bits and pieces trying to figure out what was going on before I gave up and figured out how to make this post.

I'm so glad we can edit it now. A lot of my books are in German, and 'der' and 'das' used to sort by the first character of the next word, just like if 'the' were there, but 'die' sorted on the 'd'.

>7 Sammeh_Sama:

It is not the sources per se (or it is all sources if you prefer that) - it is that if you are not adding manually, LT will help and set it properly for you when possible. I tend to forget to adjust when I add manually (and then end up needing to hunt down the books and fix them) :) So when you changed the beginning of the titles and the new title did not need the same number of skipped characters, it started looking random :) Unless you need to change the start of a title (or you have books in non-Latin scripts - these have their own oddities...), you rarely need to worry about these :)

>10 Sammeh_Sama:

Great :) Welcome to LT and have fun! :)

>13 MarthaJeanne:

Yep. The old way with the || was working but was even harder to track down issues with :)

I wish LT handled sorting the way iTunes does, which I find much more intuitive, and much more powerful.

While I am at it is there a way to remove the autogenerated identifiers? Like when I added a book I sourced the info from the wrong edition (e-book instead of the paperback) and the AISN reflects that. I've modified all the other info to reflect the actual edition I have But I can't change the AISN or add any Identifiers like an OCLC. Is there a workaround or am I just stuck with it? I even tried adding the book manually and still no luck on added an identifier.

>15 Stevil2001: How does iTunes handle sorting?

>16 Sammeh_Sama: You are stuck with the identifiers from your source.

>18 MarthaJeanne: Well thats lame, lol. Thanks for letting me know.

>19 Sammeh_Sama: You can check what identifiers your source has by clicking the ? on the right of search results. Many libraries are using OCLC number, so for that part you can often pick and choose the one that has it.

If importing Amazon data, you're stuck with ASIN though. Choosing a different source for a new record and deleting the one from Amazon is the only way to get rid of it.

It's a lot of work - and best done at the import stage having decided what mechanism to use - but I sort my series by tags. I have an author tag, and then a series tag and then everything appears where I want it, and I could ensure that series' appear in the correct (eg the way I want them) order under an author. I prefex the author and series with searchable specical characters so they go to the end of the list if I'm just viewing my other tags.

Eg Harry Potter is tagged.

!Row, /HP01 for harry potter and the philospher's stone and !row, /HP02 for the chamber of secrets

Going back and changing your scheme when you've decided you want to use a different method is very painful, so try to get it right the first time if you do this. Ensure your sort tags are the first tags in the tag field.

I wish the series field was sortable in the catalogue views, I thought it was supposed to be one of the changes TIM was considering with the new layout and series pages.

>20 SandraArdnas: I work in a library and have access to OCLC and not being able to add the OCLC # is driving me batty. At least I only have about 100 or so books cataloged so if I have to go back and start over it won't be too tedious. I was using OCLC in conjunction with LT not realizing that the initial sourcing is what places the identifiers. Seems kind of silly that we can't change them.

>21 reading_fox: Luckily I am only about 100 books in so if I want to change my method it won't be so tedious. I should have just done 2 series and a handful of stand-alone books and fiddled with everything to get it the way I liked before jumping in and adding everything willy nilly. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say.

>2 paradoxosalpha: Re: adding series name and number to the book title, I actually do this to with my e-books; since I can rename the files whatever I want, I put that info in the title so that when I sort on my device, I can see the series together in order. My LT entries simply reflect what I named the files!

>24 saltmanz: Exactly. Makes it easier to keep track of which ones you are missing when you purchase willy nilly and what order they go in. Especially those series that the books don't have to be read in order but if you do read them in the intended order the callbacks to previous books make more sense.

>25 Sammeh_Sama: Just checking: You are aware of the Series feature and that you can list which series you have books in?

Series in your library

>26 anglemark: Now I do lol. I have a confession... I haven't played with all the features on LT yet. I just wanted a list that matched the way I shelved. I probably should have fiddled with all the things first.