SEmG Railway Book Index - Notes for Contributors

Notes for Contributors to the SEmG Book List

Scope of Index
The scope is the same as SEmG, therefore the table includes books related to the Southern Railway (SR), or its predecessors or successors. The table also includes any general book which has some coverage of the SR (or its predecessors or successors).
Format of Contributions
List of books should be submitted in MS Excel, MS Access or plain text files containing delimiters between each field. Choose some character such as #, which is not used in a title as the delimiter, do not use the comma, which is the normal default.
The file should contain the following fields - Title, Author, Publisher, Year (of Publication), ISBN. The order of the fields in the file is not too critical, since it is usually obvious and the MS Access import procedure used to get it into the consolidated database is very flexible. If you can create a header record showing the names and order of the fields, that does help, but it is not essential.
Title
Please enter titles following these rules :-

The words The, A and An should be placed at the end of the title after a comma, for example :-

Ilustrated History of the Southern Railway, An
Remove any quotes in titles.
The acronyms LB&SCR, L&SWR and SE&CR should not be used, please use LBSCR, LSWR or SECR.
Full names should always use the &, for example :-

London, Brighton & South Coast Railway (note the comma between London and Brighton)

London & South Western Railway

South Eastern & Chatham Railway

Use BR instead of B.R.
Use SR instead of S.R.

All existing titles are put through a correction program to enforce these standards, but this can produce undesirable results, so it is much better if the rules are applied at the point of data entry.

Author
1. Author names should be entered with the family name first and any additional names should be entered with the initials (with full stops after the initials) and with a comma between the family name and the initials, for example :-
2. Mutiple author names should be separated by a comma except for the last two names which should use an & as a separator, for example :-
In a future version of the index it is hoped that an index by Author will be possible. The current version has not been corrected and the authors are a mess!
Publisher
No attempt has been made to standardize the names of the publisher. This may be attempted some time in the future.
ISBN

The ISBN should be entered with hyphens separating the groups of numbers (not blanks), for example :-

0-7110-1691-7

Source

The Source column indicates the initials of the contributor and is added automatically by John Russell during processing of contributions. Since May 2004, it has been decided to hide this column on the website pages. It is still retained in the database so that the origin al contributor can be traced.

Currently the table contains lists of books supplied by Norman Allum (NA), Richard Barton (RB), Tony Bush (TB), Tony Cane (TC), Colin Duff (CD), Bernard Early (BE), Christopher Gardner (CG), Eric Gates (EG), Cliff Hutton (CH), Thorgeir Lawrence (ThL), Martin Love (ML), Graham "Muz" (GM), Eric Penn (EP), Graeme Pettit (GP), Peter Richards (PR), John Russell (JR), Dave Searle (DS), Roger Stanford (RS), Michael Taylor (MT), Mark Tomas (MRT) and Gordon Weddell (GW).