[dwig]

My personal "solution" for collections, either single author or multiple, is to list all of the authors in the standard author column, the collection's title (magazine titiles include the volume, number, & publication date) in the standard title column, and then listing all of the individual included items in the Comments section. I usually fill the Comments section by opening the book/magazine in calibre's ebook-viewer, copying the ToC, and then pasting in the comments section of the metadata edit dialog, usually with some subsequent cleanup.

This this method, a simple unrestricted search for an author or title successfully finds the collected work, whether it is a standalone entry or embedded in a collected work. Also, the collected work is associated with each authors' entries in the Tag Browser