Quote:
Originally Posted by Starson17
Many times, bad series metadata is not the fault of the metadata sources either. I remember looking up series info (Wikipedia) for one series and got five different lists. Sometimes the author writes a book that fits into the middle. Some give it a half number, and others renumber the series.
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I guess what surprises me most often though is given that Calibre is only getting it's series metadata from limited places how it is that books in the same series end up with either different series names (or indeed no series at all frequently, even though it may be book 1 of a trilogy or whatever). Even on the most simplest of series like a trilogy. I would "assume" that whoever bothered to add a series entry in librarything.com also populated for other books in that series but that doesn't come through consistently. My completely uneducated guess is that there are multiple ISBN's for the title and what gets given back to Calibre then resolves through to a different series or something?
On top of that absolutely there is sometimes subjectivity over exactly what constitutes a series and in which order etc that you point out. I don't mind that so much - it's the inconsistent mish-mash of data coming back into Calibre that is a pain to me. "If" there was only one golden source it was able to use at least it would have consistency. However I always end up going to either FantasticFiction or Wikipedia for every series to come up with my own series definition.
[Hence why I and others await the day of the much-longed for feature controlling metadata download that allows us to be sure our carefully constructed series data does not get trashed should we choose to populate it first.]