Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-5442547-20130723162509/@comment-188432-20130725024322

The reason the so-called "full" credits haven't been done before is because I'm not really aware of anyone who has an absolutely complete set of liner notes. It has allowed our pages greater uniformity to simply go with the information that is accessible to all users through bigfinish.com than to give the information that we might individually own.

I rather suspect most people that bother with the audios at all tend to be like me in that we started going for physical purchases but then gave into the economic reality of going for downloads, which, though legal, are slightly inferior in that they don't give the information on the booklets.

The other thing is that credits have not been equal across all releases. There is a difference in what gets credited, making the creation of some sort of credit template somewhat tricky. For instance, in the Briggs era, Briggs and Haigh-Ellery are called "Executive Producers" on each release, while before Gary Russell and Haigh-Ellery were simply called producers. Additionally, there are some wacky things credited sometimes — The Game, as I recall, credits a lute player, of all things.

While I'm generally a fan of adding whatever behind the scenes detail that we can, I don't want to start something we have no realistic chance of finishing. I am not in favour of starting with a handful of these and hoping that someone, someday will fill them in. If all we're talking about is doing a coupla dozen of these to completion, I think it'd be better to opt for simply making sure that our entries match the level of information available on the BF website.

That said, if people want to use this thread to establish precisely how many liner notes we collectively have — and if we as a community can assert that we have over 60% of the total liner notes that currently exist — then I'd be all for adding this extra detail. If what we're talking about is only 5-10% of BF's current output, then I think we shouldn't bother.

I also think that if we are going to add this material, we must have a template for it so that we can leverage the information usefully, as we do with our television stories. This will require a little bit of thought and planning.

But let's see just how much information we have collectively first.