I've been looking at Molière today, and I merged the spellings Molière and Moliere, but I've noticed there are problems with how the search handles accents, so I'm not sure now whether all of Molière turns up when you search with "moliere". I also noticed there's a third one, Jean-Baptiste Moliere, which I think could be merged with just Molière as well as the name usually appears without Jean-Baptiste. But I'd like to make sure if this is okay, and what to do about the accent problem?

Actually, he's listed a third way (with a middle initial) as well. If I were doing it, I would combine all of them under his most complete name; but you also have the option of waiting for the much-anticipated AKA upgrade.

Back to merging authors . . . here's a tough nut.

Ken Blanchard has written tons of books. Some covers list him as Ken, and others as Kenneth. Some editions need to be combined, but they're under the two different names. Both names have dozens of books listed . . .

The reason I don't just merge the two names is that as far as I can tell, a search for "Kenneth Blanchard" doesn't turn up Ken, nor vice versa. I guess people could just search on Blanchard and find him that way . . .

What's your recommendation?

Hi Fibrowitch,

Our recommendation for titles is to follow what is on the books cover, so "The Lord of the Rings".

And yes, use the 'contact us' link to ask us any other questions.

Otis

Otis, you might be sorry you said that. I am going crazy trying to organize my book collection. 1000+ mostly hard cover.

I also have some authors that I collect each new edition, or multiple editions of. Say like the first printing of LTR (white sleeve) and the second printing (red sleeve).

I was also wondering what the standard is for the word 'the' Would the above book be listed as Lord of the Rings, The or The Lord of the Rings?

I have other questions for you about this program, can I drop you an email with them?

Hi all,

There is a set of standards we've been building here: http://www.goodreads.com/help/librarian

If you have any questions not covered in there, let us know. Our upcoming pseudonym feature for authors should greatly help issues such as in this thread.

Fibrowitch, I understand your need to emulate catalogues, but we prefer to write author names regularly, as they appear on book covers. We can always programatically change them to last, first - such as we do on the view shelves pages.

Is there a set of standards for entering authors names. I always write it as it is done in catalogs and in the Dewey system.

Last name, then first name. I only use full names. So I would write the above author as Clowes, Daniel.
Not Daniel Clowes.

Can we as librarians create a set of standards?

I had also the same experience with the author N.H. Dini and Nh. Dini (female author from Indonesia)... What i did was I did it manually to merge the data. I mean i make sure first which name is the valid one (it turns out that Nh. Dini is her pen name) and then manually I enter everybook that put N.H. Dini as the author name and edit it one by one into Nh. Dini.

If you change the name in 'Daniel Clowes' to 'Dan Clowes' it will merge the two authors. If there's a bio for 'Dan Clowes' it will be deleted, so in that case do it the other way around first: rename Dan to Daniel and then to Dan again ;)

Change all the books that have the wrong/less used name (if he goes by Dan, change all the ones by "Daniel" to Dan). It will look like it didn't work for a bit, but then the site will catch up and move them all to Dan Clowes page. I'm not sure what will happen with Daniel Clowes page...I would assume it would still be somewhere on the site, floating around lonely, but with nothing on it, people shouldn't find it.

i've noticed dan clowes has 2 different author pages, one as dan clowes and one as daniel clowes. how can i get these combined?