Work

Works are distinct literary creations, they represent the conceptional idea of a book, the work entity is for the abstract content of a book, article, paper or comic. For the physical or digital representation, see edition.

When to create new works?

New works should be created when either:

  1. The work in question is not in the database
  2. There are a significant changes to it, for example:
  3. It is a translation:

    * Example: Alice i eventyrland is a translation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

When is a work considered different from another work?

A work is different from another work if it is distinctly different, like adaptations, translations, rewritings, and so on.

A work is not a separate one if there are only minor spelling corrections or typographical changes (these aren't on the level of conceptional changes, only edit(orial) ones).

Usually divisions like chapters are considered integral to the work and not distinct from it, while poems, essays, articles and short stories are considered distinct.

* Example: A novel (with chapters) entered as a single Work entity: The Long Earth
* Example: An anthology of poems, each poem entered as a separate work: Spoon River Anthology
* However, sometimes things are more complex:
* The novel The Graveyard Book is composed of multiple chapters
* One of those chapters was previously published separately as a short story: The Witch's Headstone, for which we want a separate Work entity

What about a book's introduction/foreword/preface?

Usually we do not create works for simple introductions, prefaces and forewords.

* To register that an author wrote an introduction or foreword to a novel, you can simply use the "Author wrote introduction for Edition" relationship.
* However, since more details cannot yet be captured that way, if needed, you can create a separate Work entity to capture those details, or write them in the edition's Annotation.
* Say the introduction is denoted with emphasis (for example "Foreword by XXXXX" on the cover), contains more literary content or is a whole essay in itself, or otherwise has notable literary or historical value."

* Example:

More about translations

Explain about creating new works for translations (link to sections about which Author-Work links, which Work-Work links (and discussion about Edition-groups) to use).
Each translation of a work is distinct from the original work as well as any other language translation.

Additionally, a work can be translated into the same language several times, each of these are also separate works.

A translated work should have:

Examples:

If the translator is unknown or unidentified, the translator can be set as [unknown].

Notable information about a translation should be documented in the work's annotation.

What should works be named?

Generally this should be straightforward, e.g. the work for the book The Silmarillion by Tolkien is called "The Silmarillion"

Adaptations can often have descriptive subtitles, but if not this information should be put in the disambiguation, for translations, the name should be what is on that translation's cover. Any additional names, such as descriptive titles, known variations or transliterations, should be added as Aliases.

The language the work's name is in, can differ from the language the work as a whole is written in. For example, a work written in English can have a Latin name. The name of the work should generally be capitalized based on the rules for the language of its name.

bit about sortnames and authors intent

Sortnames are used to, as the name suggests, sort works, editions, authors and so on. To anyone who has ever tried finding anything at a library, the reason is apparent: some kind of consistent system must be in place, or finding things will be needlessly time-consuming or at worst impossible.

Generally Works are sorted on their name omitting any leading articles, like "The", "A", "Le", "Den" and so fort, which are added to the end after a comma, like so: "The Bookinator" -> "Bookinator, The".

Examples:

* "Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours" -> "Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, Le"
*



Sometimes authors have clear intent for the capitalisation or punctuation of the work's title; this is done for comedic, apropos or stylistic reasons, and should be followed.

Examples:


But what if the book has no name, then what?

Untitled works

If a work has no title, the first line or sentence of the work should be used, and since this is technically an unofficial name we use square brackets around it like so: [It was the best of times and it was the worst of times]

Generally you should also not use title case in this case, but the original sentence's capitalisation

Examples:

The sort names of untitled works should be the same, just omitting the square brackets.

Linking Works to other entities

For the full Author-Work relationships, see the Author page.

Writer

The main Author-Work relationship is that of a work to it's author(s), aka its writer(s); most every work should have at least one of these.

See the Author page for a description of the types of authors and also the difference between the "written by" Work relationship and Author Credits on Editions.

Others

Notably there is one Work-Author relationship we'll cover here: that of biographies, a work that is about an Author entity.

This is a work that is about an Author, someone already in the database. However, someone who never wrote anything, but is in some other way notable, for example; if they link other authors together, via parental or marriage relationships, if they are teachers of other authors, if they have several biographies written about them, they may be be added to BookBrainz, despite not having written anything themselves.

Examples:

- Henry Kissinger is the subject of multiple biographies but has not written any work himself

Linking works together:

Except for cases such as a fix-up or a poetry cycle as mentioned above, a discrete work should not represent a collection of works.

See series page


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