Contributing to ctlgs

No staff filled these catalogs in. Members typed them, entry by entry, on top of the databases the older sites left behind, and they are still correcting them today. How ctlgs works explains what an entry is. This page is about how you change one.

A correction needs no permission

Open any entry and there is an Edit button. Sign in and it works. There is no approval queue, no probation, no application to join a team of editors. You save, and the entry has changed for whoever looks at it next.

Signing in is a forum account at forum.ctlgs.org, and that is the whole of it — one account covers the forum and the catalogs.

It is the only arrangement that works at this size. The person who can tell you what the colophon on a 1961 printing says is the person holding the book. Make them wait for a central editor to confirm it and it never gets written down.

It is also the point of a shared entry. Your own copies hang off it — condition, where you keep it, what you paid, all of it in your collection. If the edition underneath has the wrong publisher and no ISBN, your careful record of your own copy is attached to something wrong. Fixing the entry is what makes everyone's copies worth recording.

Adding something that is not there yet

Every catalog home has an Add button with the entry types in a dropdown — a Poster, a Comic, a Series, a Company. In books, home video and video games the main action creates both halves at once (Add Book+Edition, Add Film+Release), because a printing nobody has catalogued usually belongs to a title nobody has catalogued either.

From a title's own page you can add straight into it: the Add button on the Editions or Releases section opens a form with the link back already filled in, so the new object lands under the right title.

You do not have to create every linked thing in advance. Type a printer, a venue or an author that does not exist yet into a field that links to one, and it gets created when you save, with an entry of its own for someone to fill in later.

Each entry type declares its own fields and its form is generated from them, which is why a Poster asks for a run size and a printer while a Release asks for a region and a runtime.

Every save says who, what and why

The form asks one thing beyond the fields: a summary. It is required, and the box says "Describe your changes". A line like "added ISBN from the copyright page" is plenty. It is the only context the next person gets about why the entry looks different.

A Preview button beside Save renders the entry as it will appear. For anyone who would rather see the record than the form, an edit page also has a raw mode — the stored document as editable text, reached with ?mode=raw or the Raw Edit item on the entry's menu.

Every save writes a row in that entry's history: created or edited, when, by whom, the summary, and how much the record grew or shrank. Click a row and you get the two versions compared side by side — what came out, and what went in. Nothing is overwritten quietly.

Entry pages carry the short version of that, visible to everyone whether signed in or not: "Added by" and "Last edited by", each linking to the member's profile. The full history page is for signed-in members.

Where your work shows up

Each member has a contributions page per catalog, at /contributions/{username}/{catkey}, listing the entries they added, newest first, with a tab for every catalog they have worked in. The home page and each catalog home show Contributors this Week, counted from adds and edits over the last seven days.

If you contributed to one of the older sites, that history does not attach itself — ask on the forum and it gets joined to your new account. There is a page on bringing your old account over.

Photos belong to the entry

Images attach to the entry, not to your copy of it, so a photo documents the object as catalogued — the cover, the spine, the back of the poster — and anyone trying to identify the thing in their hands can compare.

The Images tab on an edit page takes one file at a time, lets you drag the order around, and lets you turn an image off without removing it. Each of those writes its own history row, the same as a field change.

How to catalog is argued in the open

What counts as a variant. Whether a book club printing deserves its own edition. Which format a picture disc gets. Those questions are real, they are answered differently in each catalog, and they are not answered on this page. They are worked out in public on the forum, catalog by catalog, by the people doing the entering. The books guidelines are mid-rewrite there now.

Ask there before you save if you are unsure, and after you save if you turn out to have been wrong. The history means anyone can see exactly what you did, which makes that an easy conversation to have.