Journals

The old problem: how to catalogue journals? I have offprints, special issues of journals, and years' worth of some journals. I haven't gotten around to the latter, but here's an idea for the offprints and the special issues: since these have their own distinct titles, I list them under their distinct titles and put the name of the journal in "Publication," like this:
City : Journal Name
Since in this case publishing house wouldn't really make sense—there is no publishing house for most journals, or if there is, it doesn't matter much.
What do people think? How have you dealt with the challenges of cataloguing journals, offprints and special issues? I see some threads on the topic from fifteen years ago, but nothing recent. I'm new to LibraryThing, so maybe the interface has changed in the past fifteen years. I'd be interested to hear what people think!

>1 CarloPoni: Good question!

It depends on what you want and how much time you'll want to invest in the project.
I have a comics series, that is sort of a journal: "Bedste historier om Anders And". Forty issues that I've described rather detailed. I.e. a review for each story in each issue and whatever quirks I've noted.

At the other end of this I have some issues of The New Yorker, which I haven't catalogued, but I think I'd go for a single entry and just note in Review or Comments which issues I have and maybe a note or two about specially interesting stories.

So that's what I think :-)

I mostly don't catalog periodicals, but when I do, I generally just create one record for the title and detail specific issues in the Comments field. Some journals like South Atlantic Quarterly actually have ISBNs for the individual issues, and those catalog just like books, of course.

That's what I do: https://www.librarything.com/catalog/AnnieMod/magazines

I add them manually, adding all the info I have (and care about). That way I can track and review my separate issues.

>3 paradoxosalpha:

An observation on this: to me at least, a journal (that is, a peer-reviewed academic publication) is not really a periodical, except that it comes out on a schedule. I don't catalog magazines in my collection (except those that are more than fifty years old). But I do catalog journals, because those are documents of record. Because one needs to know if one has access to a particular issue, there is a lot of advantage to cataloging individual issues of a journal, and in a searcheable way.

And, yes, it is a problem, because I've found it very hard to determine if anyone else on LT has copies of, say, Midwestern Folklore or the other old journals I have which no longer exist.

If you are cataloguing individual issues it makes sense to put them in a series.

National Geographic
Threads

Your issues will ne marked, and you can see some that need combining.

>6 MarthaJeanne: If you are cataloguing individual issues it makes sense to put them in a series.

A very good point. And, for a lot of well-known journals, the series will already exist even if your particular issues aren't cataloged. One of my examples (FWIW): the Journal of American Folklore. I am responsible for adding nine issues to the series, because I'm the only person on LT to have those nine, but there are 32 other issues in the series that I did not add and could simply use if I ever get copies of those issues.

A further advantage: Whoever first started the series will probably have used some particular format for describing the issues (e.g., to take that same example, the first issue I have is Journal of American Folklore, Volume 89, Number 354 (October-December, 1976) by Jan Harold Brunvand). So, now, if I acquire another issue, I'll have a format to go by.

Things get a little more complicated when one is the first person to catalog the journal, as I was with North Carolina Folklore Journal. In that case, it's worthwhile to spend some time figuring out the format you actually want to use -- e.g. I decided to use North Carolina Folklore, Volume I, Number 1 (June, 1948) by Hoyle S. Bruton . I remain the only person on all LT with any members of the North Carolina Folklore Journal series, so I got to do it my way. :-)

However, you will also end up doing separating now and again, as the computer only searches about 20 characters in the title, and if they match, ignores the rest, so various volumes will autocombine.

>8 MarthaJeanne: However, you will also end up doing separating now and again, as the computer only searches about 20 characters in the title, and if they match, ignores the rest, so various volumes will autocombine.

True, of course, but that's going to be true of a lot of journals anyway, because just the title of the journal is more than twenty characters long! (As witness the example above of the Journal of American Folklore.)

>5 waltzmn: to me at least, a journal (that is, a peer-reviewed academic publication) is not really a periodical

Huh. As I understand it, "periodical" is a pretty elastic term that comprehends magazines, newspapers, journals, comic books and other recurrent publications. A periodical typically has a single continuous title, discriminating individual numbers, volumes, and/or issues by serial or date. As an example of how this distinction is not merely academic, Illinois exempts periodicals (but not books) from sales tax. The exemption does cover scholarly journals.

Edited to add: Your qualification "documents of record" applies in usage even more commonly to newspapers, which are surely the paragon of "periodicals."

>10 paradoxosalpha: Huh. As I understand it, "periodical" is a pretty elastic term that comprehends magazines....

I'm honestly not trying trying to have a fight about terminology. Of course you're right, and I was writing too quickly. What I meant was that a journal, as a repository of scholarly papers, is a different category than a magazine such that you would buy on a newsstand. The point is that it is very likely that one will wish to have a different cataloging scheme for journals than for magazines, etc.

There are, of course, newspapers of record, but it's a different sort of record. Those are records of events. Journals are records of research. So they tend to be kept in different sorts of archives, and recorded in different ways. Also, it is very, very rare for an archive to keep just one, or even just seven or ten, copies of a newspaper. They'll subscribe for a year or more. But a library might well have only one issue of a journal, particularly if it's an annual.

Note: I edited out a paragraph with another of my errors. I'm having an error-prone day. Apologies to all.