#1186 Create a Title disambiguator field

[Ahasuerus]

(Based on http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/ISFDB:Community_Portal#Title_disambiguation_--_a_software_approach):

Currently we distinguish/disambiguate between title records with identical titles in the following ways:

• For common essay names like "Introduction" and "Afterword", we append the name of the book where the essay appears in parentheses
• For non-unique serial titles, we add "(Part X of Y)"
• For novel-length works published in a single magazine/fanzine issue, we add "(Complete Novel)"
• For poems written by the same author which share the same title, we occasionally add the first line of the poem
• For omnibuses, we have a special field, "Content", which contains title-specific information and can serve as a disambiguator. For example, consider the following 2 omnibuses: "The Lunar Chronicles" (2016) [O/1-4,0.5] vs. "The Lunar Chronicles" (2018) [O/0.5-4+coll]
• For multiple INTERIORART records associated with the same work and appearing in the same publication, we add "[1]", "[2]", etc.
• For works that have been significantly abridged, expanded, revised, etc, sometimes we add "(abridged)", "(expanded"), etc to the title and sometimes we don't
• For most other identical fiction titles, we don't add anything, which can be problematic when the same author is responsible for multiple works with the same title. For example, H. P. Lovecraft's Summary page shows three "The Lurking Fear and Other Stories" collections published in 1947, 1964 and 1971. They are all different, but you can't tell until you drill down to the title level and check each title's Note field. Similarly, there are 2 version of the story "The Rats in the Walls" (1924 and 1956), 4 "[To Albert A. Sandusky]" poems and 9 (sic!) poems whose title is currently entered as "[To ?]". Analogously, Clark Ashton Smith wrote 4 different "Ennui" poems, 2 different "A Sunset" poems, 3 "sonnet" poems, etc.

This is inconsistent and gets us further away from our goal of recording data "exactly as stated".

One way to address this issue would be to add a new "disambiguator" field to title records. It would be used to record and display what are currently the disambiguating components of titles. We could then move the vast majority of existing disambiguators from the "Title" field to the "Content" field programmatically.

If we decide to add this field, we will need to address three issues:

1. Add the new field to the set of fields available in the Contents section of our data entry forms. (Note that this would be a subset of FR 1185, "Allow editing all Title-specific fields during Pub Contents editing".)

2. Merging logic. The current title uniqueness criteria are:

3. the same author(s)
4. the same title

5. substantially the same text (minor textual variations do not count, but different translations do)
   At this time titles include "embedded disambiguators", which make otherwise identical title records unique. If we were to move these disambiguators to a new field, we would need to decide whether we want to add "the same disambiguator" to the list of uniqueness criteria.

6. Field name: distinguishing notation, disambiguation, disambiguator, disambiguation text/note have been proposed.

[Anonymous]

There is another title uniqueness criterium that will need to be considered, nl. translator. I.e. same title, different translators is different title record.