Entering the Contents of a Book or Periodical : Help

Freebase allows the contents of a book, periodical, or any other type of publication to be entered and displayed, and furthermore allows any type of work to be included as contents. Because of the necessity to allow many different types to both hold contents and appear as contents, the task of entering data can sometimes be a bit cumbersome, depending on the data involved. Note that articles published in scholarly journals are an exception to this model. Please see Entering Scholarly Works and Citations for information about entering journal articles.

Contents can be entered from two directions – entering the contents of a publication, or entering publications that a work has been published in.

Entering Contents of a Publication

This handled by using a type called “publication”. Potentially, anything can be co-typed as a publication, but usually it will be a book, book edition, or periodical issue.

From the topic page of the publication you want to add contents to, add the type publication. (Note that periodical issues are always assumed to have contents and are therefore automatically co-typed as publications).
Publication has one property, “contents”, which itself has two additional properties: “work” and “page number”.
- Enter the title of one of the contents of the book under “work”
- Enter the page number the work begins on
- Repeat as necessary and click "save"
If all the works you entered are already in Freebase and have the appropriate types, you are done.
If you created a new work (or works), there is one more step to complete.
- Click the title of the work you added
- On that work’s topic page, note that the only type is “published work”; to add the type of work that it is (e.g., short story, poem, play, book, etc.), click “types” and enter the appropriate type.
- You can now add additional information about this work (author, language, etc.) if you want to.

Entering the Places a Work Has Been Published

This handled by using a type called “published work”. Potentially, anything can be co-typed as a published work, although it will generally be some type of written work. It can also be a derivative form of a work, such as a translation, serial installment, or excerpt.

Start on the topic page of the work you want to add publications to:

Add the type published work to the topic, if it is not already there.
Published work has only one property: “published in/published as”, which in turn has two additional properties: “publication” and “page number”.
- Enter the title of the publication the work appears in
  - The title you enter depends upon the type of publication it is; for periodical issues, usually some form of the title of the periodical and the date of issue; for books, usually the full title.
- Enter the page number the work begins on (this does not apply in all cases, for example a short story published as a stand-alone book would not need a page number, since it is the entire contents of the book)
- Click “save”
If the publication you entered is already in Freebase and has the appropriate type, you are done.
If not, there are a few more steps to complete.
- Click the title of the work you added
- Next, determine what type the new publication should be (by default, it is “publication”, but since that contains no data besides “contents”, it needs to have an additional co-type).
  - If it is an issue of a magazine, add the type magazine issue;
  - If it is an issue of a newspaper, add the type Newspaper Issue
  - If the work is contained in a book, add the type Book Edition

If the publication is a periodical issue

Enter the periodical that the issue belongs to
Enter the date of publication for the issue

If the publication is a book edition:
- Enter the book that it is an edition of; if the book does not exist yet, create a new one.
- Enter any other data that you have, such as author, ISBN, etc. (See Entering Data for a Book for more information.)

Special Cases:

Translations: see Entering a Translated Work of Literature
Serializations and Excerpts: see Entering Serialized and Excerpted Works of Literature
Reviews, Interviews, short non-fiction: Entering Reviews, Interviews, and Other Types of Short Non-Fiction
Omnibus and Dos-à-dos editions: Entering Special Kinds of Books