This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For's comments (member since Feb 19, 2008)

This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For's comments from the Goodreads Librarians group.

Got 'em

It would be nice to see the actual title page, rather than the cover. It might make it clearer what the "Title" actually is.

Note to self: I'm currently up through #276.

Note to others 1: Please remember to add a note, when possible, to an author's profile stating that there are multiple authors with the same name.

Note to others 2: Mrs. Richard Powell = Dora Mary Powell.

Should "Reader's Digest" be considered an author? One could make an argument that they are an editor and given them the editor role (since the true editor is probably not listed or may vary from condensed book to condensed book).

Instant notification of change won't do any good if someone makes a couple of really bad combinations. Once that occurs you're pretty much out of luck (and combining is one of the few thing that simply cannot be undone and which does not show up in the log in such a way that allows one to easily reverse it...this is not a criticism, but just a sad fact of the nature of combining editions).

I don't think locked authors will get too stale, because I don't think that many will end up locked. Some of the more frustrating authors from the past have largely settled down since the advent of librarian notes (which are not perfect, but do help quite a bit). It's likely to only be an issue with older, popular authors with ambiguous book titles.

If it is implementable, we could always try it for awhile and see how it works. And this is not to say that other solutions wouldn't be welcomed as well.

Speaking of librarian notes, the general librarian note for the author (as opposed to the librarian note for individual books)...this is displayed at the top right of the combine page. Librarians often use this for "Do not use auto-combine". But the auto-combine button is at the very bottom of the page. Could the librarian note be repeated next to the auto-combine button as an extra defense? I don't know that auto-combine has caused any particular problems lately, but it makes sense to put the "Don't push this button" warning next to the button rather than the door into the room.

The note may have nothing to do with auto-combine, but repeating it at the bottom of the page would give it extra emphasis, regardless.

One of the things I've come to realize about particularly problematic authors is you have to completely saturate their books with librarian notes. Every edition, if necessary, with specific details about what's in them and what to combine or not combine them with.

For an amusing example, go to the combine page for Robert Silverberg and scroll down to the books whose titles start with "Legends".

Blah...I just found a pair of new, unique subsets of the first Legend work, incorrectly combined with the full work. Two more versions created.

Someone has recently (er...within the last six months) combined a ton of completely different Sherlock Holmes stories into one giant mess of over 600 editions.

These have always been problematic because it can be very difficult to determine which stories are in which very similarly named works, but the new major problem is that the Complete works were combined with the Adventures of..., which is a completely different book (although it is quite possible that there is a complete collection called the Adventures of...). Sigh.

However it's not even that simple. Just scrolling through the over 600 combined books I see many individual novels (Hound of the Baskervilles, A Study in Scarlet), other short story collections (His Last Bow), etc, also combined into this single mess.

In fact, if you go through the entire Arthur Conan Doyle list you will see combined works *WHICH HAVE LIBRARIAN NOTES* asking that they not be combined.

This makes me want to try to resurrect the petition to lock certain authors.

I had already sounded it out...that was part of the appeal :-)

I haven't been to one in many a year, but TINTMYLF has to be my new Con name!

I generally believe abridgments should be combined with the full work, but I wouldn't consider the 1001 Arabian Nights versions described in the first message as abridgments, but rather more like different short story collections. Perhaps, that's nitpicking over what an abridgment is, but it seems consistent to me. I certainly agree that the smaller story sets should not be combined with the full work.

The frustrating part is that I've completely cleaned up some of these in the past but they keep coming back due Amazon imports. A librarian's job is never done.

I wish I could take credit for it, but I'm not a GoodReads employee and didn't actually do the work to make it happen.

Although...it was originally my idea, so I will take some credit for it :-)

Librarians, as of last night/this morning, GR has added a new "Edition" field to book entries. This is the place where we can now store information that really doesn't belong in the title nor the binding, such as "10th anniversary edition", "large print", "author's preferred edition", "abridged" or whatever.

An example is this version of The Da Vinci Code. Originally the title of this book was: "The Da Vinci Code (Special Illustrated Edition)". Now the title is just "The Da Vinci Code" and "Special Illustrated Edition" (which is entered in the new edition field) shows up as part of the details (in between binding and # of pages).

We should add info about this to the librarian manual.

Scrolling down from the top, perhaps 5-10% of the way through the list, I found 10 cases where the covers were different, two of which were covers for completely different books.

Rivka's comment about the date is that the "Name of the Award" should not include the year. The award itself should include the year.

When you enter an award for a book as:

"Hugo Award for Best Novel (2009)"

the GR parser will break this into three parts:

1. "Hugo Award" - the name of the award
2. "Best Novel" - the category of the award
3. "2009" the year the award was given

Rivka is referring to things like "2009 Hugo Award for Best Novel" because in this case the name of the award will be "2009 Hugo Award"

Sarcasm aside, I think a GR award is a pretty good idea if you can work out a reasonable and fair nomination/voting process (and it sounds like you've got some good ideas on this).

Ooohhhh....I can't wait until Twilight wins the GoodReads Book award!

You're probably right. It'd be nice to link them formally, but it would require finer control over the way the award names are generated.

Does anyone have an opinion on the best way to signify awards which give official runner-up awards (as opposed to just nominations)? For example, the Caldecott Medal is given to the best American picture book each year. The Caldecott Honor is officially given to noteworthy runner-ups.

Currently these are listed as separate awards. Would it make sense to combine them into a single award, and if so, how?

The only other similar case I can think of the CWA Gold Dagger/Silver Dagger Awards (the silver daggers are given to runner-ups), but there are probably others.

This is rough, but I started writing down some suggested rules and guidelines for awards. Some of these may need discussion and obviously there are a lot missing, but I wanted to get some examples and specifics listed while they were fresh in my mind:

Awards fall into three broad categories, only one of which should actually be included on the awards list.
1. “Best book” awards. These are the standard, bread-and-butter sorts of awards and should be listed. Examples include the “Hugo Award for Best Novel (2009)” and the “Caldecott Medal (2009)”. Awards such as these are normally only given to a single work every year, although ties and/or official runner-up awards may also be given (e.g., the CWA Silver Dagger). Generally, only “significant” awards should be listed, but how to define significance still needs to be discussed, and will likely come down to librarian consensus for any questionable awards. National and international awards are good. Local and regional awards, probably not (e.g., the Southwestern Texas Parents-Teachers-Librarian Association Award for Best Teen Novel) (I made this up).

2. “Top Lists”. These are fairly common, but should NOT be listed. Things like “Top 100 books of the 20th century” or “Top 10 Romances of 2009”. These are a dime-a-dozen and should be avoided. They are a fundamentally different issue than the awards listed in #1.

3. Awards given to authors rather than books. There are a number of awards that are given to authors, rather than specific works, the biggest of which is the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel Prize for Literature is a lifetime achievement award, not an award for a specific book (sometimes specific books are mentioned in the announcement as exemplars, but the award is not given to those books). Because these awards are given to authors and not specific books, they should NOT be listed (although they should definitely be mentioned in the author bio). One will often see the Nobel Prize for Literature attached to books (e.g., “The Old Man and the Sea” or “Blindness”), but this is incorrect. Another similar sort of award would be “Best New Author”. Thus, one should not list the “John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer” on a book, since it is given to a promising author, not to a specific book. This is different than an award given for a specific work, such as the “Bram Stoker Awards for Best First Novel” which falls under the category #1 and should be listed.

Guidelines for split/combined works:
Awards should only be attached to the full/matching work for which it was originally awarded. It should not be attached to an omnibus/anthology which contains the winning work and should not be attached to subdivisions of the work which won the awards. Some examples:

* “A Storm of Swords” by George R.R. Martin won the Locus award in 2001. This award should only be attached to the full work. This book has also been published in two parts in Germany, in three parts in Italy, and in four parts in France. If one were to attach the award to all subpieces, the full awards list would have this single winner listed 10 times.

* “Young Miles” by Lois McMaster Bujold is an omnibus containing “The Warrior’s Apprentice”, “The Mountains of Mourning”, and “The Vor Game”. “The Mountains of Mourning” won both Hugo and Nebula awards for novella, while “The Vor Game” won the Hugo award for novel. While these awards should be attached to the individual works, they should not be attached to the omnibus. Awards should only be attached to an omnibus or anthology if the award was actually given to the omnibus/anthology.

* It is very common for short story collections to have the title of an award winning short story contained within them. The awards should not be given to these collections, because the award was for a specific story, not for the collection. (Since award winning stories are likely to be published over and over again, this would also add clutter to the award lists). If/when short stories are listed as separate works in GoodReads (which with eBooks is becoming more likely/common), the award should be attached to the story just as it is attached to a book.