Keith’s Comments (group member since Sep 19, 2008)

Keith’s comments from the Goodreads Librarians Group group.

Rachel wrote: "All of the following quotes were only from the Narnia movies, not the books, and therefore cannot have been written by C.S. Lewis.

If any of them come back and are lyrics, they should probably be attributed to Harry Gregson-Williams (as far as I can tell). And if they are lyrics, they will almost certainly be back, and be misfiled.

rivka wrote: "If imports were perfect, there'd be no need for librarians."

And if we know in what ways they are most frequently imperfect, we can hopefully also find ways to code around them when the cost/benefit justifies it.

I, for one, wish there were an easier way for Librarians to search for common errors (e.g., the above, dates included in the author_name field, variations in diacritic marks or high/low ASCII/UTF characters) but I'm not holding my breath until that becomes a priority.

Thanks to whoever beat me to that.

Peter's question made me curious how widespread the problem might be, and that led me to find another one that's a little bit trickier.

Author Chemistry actually exists, and should, but mostly appears as a secondary author-subject like Biology was above.

Physics, thankfully, does not appear to have the same problem. (Yet?)

Fantastic. I'll come back to it if no one beats me to it.

Is there someone with higher-than-Super permissions who can do that, or who can teach me how? Someone appears not to know the difference between Author and Subject:

http://www.goodreads.com/author/edit/...

No need for merging, and not the primary author on anything I can see, so it seems to be a straight deletion, but I'd rather not have to edit all those books individually and I can't see how to make the profile disappear.

teacup_carousel wrote: "Please delete the following quotes. They are all from the musical and theatrical productions of Phantom of the Opera and not the book. While some are properly attributed to Andrew Lloyd Weber, they..."

The problem appears to be that someone merged all the Leroux books with all the Lloyd-Webber adaptations, in direct contravention of the guidelines. I'm fixing it now.

OK, 5 hours later, I believe I have all of the ALW works separated from the Leroux (and many, but not all, other adaptations as well—that needs more work, if someone feels up to sifting). The above quotes now have been properly attributed to lyricist Charles^^Hart (ALW wrote the music, not the words quoted) and to the songbook.

Re: 387, has the screenplay been published? The movie quotes are going to come back over and over, so maybe they could be moved to the screenwriter and screenplay rather than deleted.

Got most of 490: two items left I wasn't sure how to deal with.

It's not from Hitchhiker's, it's from Salmon of Doubt; I confirmed this before updating & combining it with the duplicate copies that already existed, and can do so again if anyone demands evidence, but a search against Google Books should do it if anyone wants to see for themselves.

On #379, I've added an "attributed" tag: with 50,000+ likes, it will surely come back if deleted, and it's never attributed to anyone else so far as I can tell, so there's nowhere to move it to. In fact, we don't know that she never said it; we only lack evidence of the original source (so far). If anyone can find evidence for another source, I'll be happy to switch it, and add a "misattributed to marilyn monroe" tag instead.

I did the same for the short version:
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/...

I also did a few combines, and moved this one to Clara Bow with the misattribution tag:
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/...

And I'll clean up what I can of the rest later.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63...

The ISBN-10 listed in the ISBN-13 field is listed as a different book and author in Worldcat (which is not always perfectly accurate either). I think I should leave this one to someone who can deal with Russian better than I can.

Possible feature request for later addition:

Ability to add to a quote additional books in which the quote was cited.

So, for the example above:

Author: Douglas Adams
Book: Hitchhikers'....

Quoted by: Richard Dawkins
Quoted In: The God Delusion

And if such a thing is ever implemented, it will be handy also to have a librarian feature that lets the editor easily switch the current Author to Quoted-by (maybe like the way we can change the order of Authors on the book/edit page), since this is the kind of error I find myself constantly fixing.

I'd say both features are low priority, and the librarian feature lower still, but they would be cool, and could make our quote database more useful & complete than anyone else's.

Banjomike wrote: "It isn't in the radio version. Just the novel."

Should be page 107 of this edition.

Merged, corrected, and attributed 356.

(And here I thought I was the first one to come up with that pun. Shoulda known better.)

Heh, well, that just shows how out of my depth I am at the moment.

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...

It looks to me like at some point, two authors got merged who should not have been, and now they are some weird split-personality profile.

I hope it wasn't my mistake (I did do some combining of books before I looked at the profile itself), but if it was and someone could tell me what I likely did wrong, that would be helpful.

Meanwhile, I have no idea what to do with this one, and would appreciate help from another Librarian, especially if someone knows something about any of the authors involved.

Abigail wrote: "Correct me if I'm wrong - and I very well could be, since it's been ages since I joined in the discussion of this issue - but I thought we had also agreed that distinct editions/works (titles that ..."

I just read the whole of both threads today, and I don't think there was consensus on that one way or the other. I've been leaving those the way I find them, generally, and otherwise following the established guidelines that apply to all books (i.e., subsequent editions are combined as editions of the same work, regardless of the extent of new material).

Copied from Mikey's other thread, as a suggested replacement for his unclear third bullet point, per rivka's request:

Due to its extremely large number of translations and editions, The Bible is an exception to the usual rules for combining books into a single "work." For The Bible only, each "Translation Version" is regarded as a separate work. All editions of a given translation of The Bible should be combined to a single work, and distinct "translation versions" should not be combined. Thus, for example, all of the King James Versions (KJV) get combined, and all of the New International Versions (NIV) get combined, but the KJV should not be combined with the NIV. Similarly, as with other 2-in-1 books, all editions that include both the KJV and NIV should be combined with each other, but not with either the stand-alone KJV or NIV editions.

Mikey wrote: "I don't know why they keep getting messed up again."

I suspect that it is because (1) people often don't read the instructions, (2) even I occasionally think I remember the instructions I read correctly, but am in fact wrong, and (3) because this issue still hasn't been settled well enough to be added to the instructions to begin with.

FWIW, the Bible listings are rather a mess again, and at least as far as that goes, I agree with Mikey's suggestions entirely, though I agree his suggested language for the Librarian Manual could use some additional clarity.

He first suggested: sacred texts with an indefinitely numerous amount of translation versions within the same language (e.g. The Bible in English) should not be combined with unrelated or distinct translation versions.

He later revised this to: When Combining editions of The Bible "Translation Versions" should be regarded as separate books. Unrelated or distinct "translation versions" should not be combined.

I might suggest: Due to its extremely large number of translations and editions, The Bible is an exception to the usual rules for combining books into a single "work." For The Bible only, each "Translation Version" is regarded as a separate work. All editions of a given translation of The Bible should be combined to a single work, and distinct "translation versions" should not be combined. Thus, for example, all of the King James Versions (KJV) get combined, and all of the New International Versions (NIV) get combined, but the KJV should not be combined with the NIV. Similarly, as with other 2-in-1 books, all editions that include both the KJV and NIV should be combined with each other, but not with either the stand-alone KJV or NIV editions.

It's slightly wordy, but I think it makes both the process and the rationale clearer. If we ever decide to do this for more than just The Bible (e.g., the Gita, as Mikey suggested) we can re-edit the manual for the wider cases, but for now I suggest that it is best to implement only the one exception and see how that goes.

FWIW, in the absence of formal policy, I have been keeping my Bible sorting to a relative minimum, but following Mikey's plan where it seems necessary and is clearly indicted by his Librarian Notes or implements the standard Librarian Manual policies (e.g. separating New Testament Only from Complete Bible).

ETA: a remaining open question is whether NKJV should be combined with KJV, TNIV with NIV, etc. I am insufficiently expert or invested there, so I render no opinion on that.

I just finished reading An Outline of Psycho-Analysis and went to add it here. Looking it up by ISBN took me to that link, but my edition is way different: 20 years older and half as many pages in Mass-Market format, not to mention the very different cover. Now what do I do? Do we have a best-practice for these cases yet?