Hello All: I've just embarked on a reading project involving Hans Christian Andersen, and have been looking up various editions that I will soon be adding to my shelves. In the course of doing so, I've noticed a few problems. My apologies for the length of my post...

--First, I noticed that a librarian note appears at the top of the combine page for Andersen, requesting that Disney editions, which are only loosely based on the real tales, not be combined. I think that this is the right position, as they are textually quite different. Disney's Little Mermaid, for instance, really doesn't belong with the Andersen tale. But perhaps we have a different policy? In any case, I see that the Disney editions have been combined - should I try to separate them out? Some of them aren't even the "original" (Disney) tale, but subsequent adventures... The mind boggles.

--Second, in the process of looking at different collections, I noticed that they are all lumped together willy-nilly, regardless of content. Complete editions, together with any number of "Fairy Tales of HCA" type volumes. I know we talked about this some time ago, and said that when a user came along with evidence (book in hand) that a particular edition had content different from the others, they should be separated, and/or kept separate. So this edition, for instance, which has 17 tales, should NOT be combined with this, which has 27. Any way to prevent auto-combine, or uninformed librarians, from combining them? Given that they have almost the same titles, I can see this being a problem Or will I just need to constantly police them?

--Third, I know that an automatic description has been championed by some of you, but from what I've seen so far, it's a poor idea. This is especially true of fairy-tales where multiple editions, all with different illustrators, have been combined. I've seen the same description, all for one specific edition, used for almost every version of The Little Match Girl. When I went in to delete the incorrect description, it just supplied it again. Do I need to put something- maybe "Illustrated by X" in the note field, in order to get it not to do this? If that's the case, I submit that the feature needs some serious work.

Anyway, that's all for now. I appreciate any thoughts and advice, as I go forward, and as this will be an ongoing project, I expect I'll be posting back...

Hi, Abigail! That sounds like quite the project. :)

First: Yes, the best way to handle those Disney adaptions is going to be to separate each one out and then change its primary author to something which better reflects that this is a heavily adapted story: the adapter's name, if it can be found.

Second: Auto-combines are already discouraged for HCA (the link is only at the bottom of the page with a stern warning) because of the numbers of combined works, so the biggest concern will be well-meaning librarians. In that case, a librarian's note per edition is generally useful, since it's prominent on the combine page.

Third: You should be able to save changes to the default description when you save changes to any edition -- are the changes not saving? It's been working for me in the past, so you might want to make a bug report for that. The default description should be stripped of all edition-specific information whenever you notice it. (The default description is a different field from the edition description; it's one of the new fields at the bottom of the edit page.) (The way to keep a default description from showing is to put anything in the description field of the specific edition, by the way; since nothing else will show, you should make sure to put a full description in.)

Thanks for the response, Cait! Yes, I think this will be an interesting undertaking... :)

I will get to work on the Disney editions sometime tomorrow, I think. Glad to hear that the auto-combine is discouraged in this case. Will post librarian notes as I go along.
Regarding the default description, I have seen quite a few that reference specific illustrators thus far! It didn't even occur to me, until reading your post, that it would be easier to edit the default, than trying to add notes for every edition! DUH! Thanks!

For the Disney tales, we had come up with a default author name of Walt Disney Company for all of them, since stuff published by them rarely has an author attributed. (It's a mondo-project I started and haven't visited in a while - I definitely need to get back to working on it!)

I'd suggest changing the primary author on the Disney one to Walt Disney Company and then they will be moved over to that author page and off the HCA page entirely.

I agree with Cait on her answers to your other two questions. = ) The only thing I'd add is with the sheer number you're talking about, might be better to make a librarian's note at the top of the page, warning other well-meaning folks not to combine collections, since their content will be different. (This is a problem on many authors, though. I just cleaned up a bunch of combines of Louis L'Amour's collected works yesterday.)

Thanks for taking this on!

Carolyn wrote: "I'd suggest changing the primary author on the Disney one to Walt Disney Company and then they will be moved over to that author page and off the HCA page entirely."

They will still need to be separated out manually. Changing the author doesn't automatically uncombine them. :)

Thanks, Carolyn and vicki_girl! I'll be working my way through this rather slowly, as I intend to do it some detail. I've sorted through Thumbelina already, separated what needed separating, and adding illustrators and images to every edition I could. Currently working on The Little Match Girl and The Wild Swans. The collections will be the biggest headache, of course! :)

vicki_girl wrote: "They will still need to be separated out manually. Changing the author doesn't automatically uncombine them. :) "

You are definitely right about that!
Sorry, forgot to mention it.

Good luck Abigail!

I'm in need of some advice, from more experienced librarians, as I've stumbled across a puzzling situation, in my continuing efforts to straighten out the Hans Christian Andersen collections. I've mostly been concentrating on sorting out individual tale titles, but as I move on to the collections, I've decided on a basic strategy:

First, to make sure that all the "complete" editions are together. Second, to separate out those collections I know have distinctive content. Third (in the absence of better knowledge), to leave the rest of the incomplete collections together (but separate from the complete collections). I hope this sounds like a reasonable strategy...

Anyway, when looking through the masses of collections that have been grouped together, willy-nilly, I happened across this listing:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95762...

Now, going by the image provided, this is a specific collection that I have already separated out:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63560...

If this is genuinely the version illustrated by Isabelle Brent, with twelve tales, it needs to be separated from the mass-collection mess, and combined with the other editions. The thing is, the Isabelle Brent edition was definitely NOT published in 1946, by the World Publishing Co. My first thought was to delete Brent's name, and the image, from this listing, and to try to locate the correct image and illustrator for this 1946 edition. But when I went to edit, the system told me that the image was being supplied by amazon!

How can amazon supply an image for a non-ISBN item? Could someone have gone into a genuine Brent-illustrated listing (with ISBN), and deleted all the information they didn't want, rather than creating a separate listing for their own book? If this is the case, how do I straighten this out? Should this edition just be deleted, and the ratings and reviews merged with the other ones? Thanks for any help on this one - it sure has me puzzled!

Actually, what you stated about somebody deleting/changing the information is exactly what happened. I looked in the librarian change log for that edition, and indeed, that's what someone did last year. As to fixing it...well, hopefully someone else will chime in with a good idea.

Looks like.

And yeah, I'd delete it and let the ratings transfer to the primary edition.

OK, thanks ladies! I was confused, because I don't think there were more than two editions of the Brent, and they're both already on GR. Possibly imported again, after someone messed with this other listing? Anyway, I will go delete now! Thank you! :)

Oops! It looks like only a super-librarian can delete that edition, which has 88 ratings. Rivka, do you think you could oblige? I appreciate it!

Abigail wrote: "Possibly imported again, after someone messed with this other listing?"

Almost certainly.

Deleted.

Thanks, Rivka!