User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-24894325-20151119211902/@comment-24894325-20151227235307

Wow, I thought of doing a similar listing but am glad I didn't: it would have been worse, worse formatted and less to the point.

First off, I want to agree and reiterate that Big Finish plays fast and loose with naming, juggling not only volumes/series but even ranges. I distinctly remember that the Dark Eyes mini-range used to be part of the Eighth Doctor Adventures range (which used to be called "The New Eighth Doctor Adventures" and is still called that somewhere in the Wikia). The new stuff they shuffle around even more actively. Jago & Litefoot & Strax (audio story) is in both The New Series and Jago & Litefoot ranges. The Diary of River Song has just received its own range: I swear it was only in The New Series before. Also The Collected Nth Doctor are not real ranges and should not be considered here. So relying on range information from the publisher carries its dangers, which is not to say we should not adopt the monicker range.

I actually have a different understanding of how they use anthology and volume (series I understand less). It seems to me that they use volume for anything that they (plan to) release in several rounds. I mean The First Doctor: Volume One is part of the Companion Chronicles range to be followed by The Second Doctor: Volume One. It does not carry any additional connotation, IMHO, other than "Oh, I'm part of a sequence of releases." There is a similar use in books publishing: we can have a multi-volume anthology, a multi-volume "collected works" of an author, or a multi-volume edition of Harry Potter or War and Piece. So I do not read anything into their use of volume.

It feels to me that they use anthology when individual stories constitute just part of a physical CD. It's a warning they give: "unlike the usual thing you expect, this is not one story you're getting, you're getting several stories under one cover.

To the question of what to replace the word anthology with for many of the cases and how to distinguish between volume and series, I propose to separate concerns. The word I heard most in the podcasts and saw in many promotional materials and even official release data (cf. The Fifth Doctor Box Set) is box set. This term is objective as it describes the packaging: several CDs, each with its own case and cover art and containing one story. Why can't we write Only the Monstrous (box set)? I bet it will take care of most titles in your beautiful table (I promise to check exactly, but later: time to sleep). Note that I do not consider 2-disc or 3-disc main range releases, or things like Shada to be box sets in this sense.

If we do this, then we have essentially four categories:
 * anthologies (single-cover/case releases with more than one story);
 * ordinary releases (single-cover/case releases with one story);
 * box sets (multi-cover/case releases);
 * box sets that together form a series.

The series designation may require a case-by-case approach with volume 01 being a favorable sign for this treatment. But I need to think more about this and look through the source material in the table first.

While I didn't go through the table, I did some spot checking. It seems that the packaging is consistent with the word usage you describe above that I was most concerned about. For instance, The Sixth Doctor: The Last Adventure is described as a story and seems to have only one cover. The Fifth Doctor Box Set seems to have one CD cover per story. The First Doctor Box Set (which incidentally does not even have its own page) seems to have one CD cover per story. The Worlds of Big Finish, which is explicitly described as an anthology seems to have only one cover and multiple stories per CD.