Sorting by Series & by Author or applying multiple sorting methods

Hello, I have recently found this great resource and it is an amazing tool. I've entered my entire library and it worked incredibly well!

I have a question regarding sorting by series. I have read the posts on this matter and it appears that there is no way to sort by series in the typical manner - by clicking on the SERIES column header, as one would with NAME or ENTRY DATE.

I would really like to see this functionality added. Also, it would be nice to be able to apply 2 or more sorting methods so that I could have my library sorted by author, and then sorted by series. Then you would have an alphabetical list of authors and any series by that author grouped together in order within the series.

I have seen this in other database apps like iTunes, where you can sort by artist, and retain that artist sorting while also sorting by album or release date. iTunes does this by having SORT fields within the song file information so that each song has it own "internal" sorting applied, but you can also sort columns in the database and both are retained and work together.

Basically, I would just like to go down my library sorted by author and be able to see all of the series in order by each author. Similarly, it would be great to have my library sorted by author and then also have the books sorted alphabetically "within" each author.

If there is a way to do this already please let me know how to do this! And I hope I explained this well enough!

Thanks,
Shawn

The "by author and then by title inside of the author" is easy: either sort by title and then by author (this will send the "by title" to become a secondary sort) or if you use the setting screen, use author as primary and title as secondary. :) If some books look out of order, take a look at their sorting character (the field immediately after the title in the edit screen - for titles starting with the it should be 5, for ones starting with a - 3, for an -> 4 and for everything else it should be empty or start. Newish books are recorded properly but some older ones may have that messed up).

The series are more complicated. A book can be in multiple series so the field is not sortable. If you want to see them sorted that way, you will need to build your own sortable field. You can use comments, private comments, Other call number system, the first tag or the start of the publication field and then put there are string that will be used for the secondary (or primary sort). If author will always be your primary, you can use SERIES NUMBER as the sorting string (Brunetti 04 for example). It is a bit of work at the start but it gives you some flexibility (and as it is your data and not the series field, noone can mess up your numbering and/or order).

Now for the RSI itself... if the series field becomes sortable and the book has more than one series, which one would be chosen for the sort?

Hope this helps a bit. :)

PS: Also - as I am a serial series reader, one thing I do a lot is to filter by a series. In your catalog, go to the drop down that says "Tags". If you pull it down, you can chose series in there (or authors) and it will give you a list if all your titles or authors. Clicking on it will give you all matching books.

While not exactly what you are asking for, it is useful for finding out what you have without leaving the catalog (so you can see your own details).

>3 AnnieMod: Thank you for all of your help! I do like the tags drop down. Although, as you stated, not exactly what I was looking for, it is a nice feature that I didn't know about.

As for the sort by author then by title...again, thank you for that info. And I do see the effect of the sorting character. I've already fixed a few of these. I also understand building your own sortable fields. That would take some time! And yes, I am not sure how to handle having more than one series. That would be an issue.

I guess maybe having a few more additional levels of sub-sorting would be nice, now that I realize you can do that with the secondary sorting. Maybe for the books that belong to multiple series, if they were, perhaps by default, sorted alphabetically within the series column or list - then if you could sort by series further down the sorting chain (meaning after the secondary sort), at least multiple series books would all be sorted by the same first alphabetical series. Perhaps this could work eventually?

Again, thank you for all of your instruction! I didn't know about any of these features. This database tool is really incredible!

Cheers!

You can put series as the first tag to be able to sort by series

>5 SandraArdnas: Thank you!

My view of series is often more complex. For some series I will not only have multiple copies of a given title but I want to see them by order of publication. For this reason, having two sort terms isn't quite enough.

My approach is to make the first line of the Comment field include (perhaps) my preferred series name and a volume number with leading zeros (for sorting) and after this the approximate printing year. Not every series entry has this but many do and it can help.

For some of the series that are more important to me, I will make a Collection to allow me to filter and view just items inside that collection for further sorting or searching or manipulation.

The existing tools have a lot of possibilities.

James

I use 'other call number' which is sortable and customisable. I list by author, then series and then volume number.

Please note that it sorts by the first digit so if your series goes above 9, I recommend putting a 0 before the single digits (01, 02, 03 ...), otherwise you'll get 1, 10, 11, 2, 3 etc.