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

Keith’s comments from the Goodreads Librarians Group group.

Hm, I understood that about an abridgement (i.e., taking something long and making it shorter, like Reders Digest Condensed Books), but I didn't realize we were doing it for the reverse case as well. It seems like The Stand in particular, which is more than twice as long, is really a different book. But like I said, "My understanding, subject to revision...." My understanding is hereby revised.

Follow-up question: what of cases where a novel is based on the author's short story, like (IIRC) Ender's Game? Where's the cut-off between new edition and new book? How do we tell when something is an uncombinable adaptation (e.g., YA version) vs. a combinable abridgement? Do we just leave it alone until someone has enough access to the volume itself to determine whether it is fewer words vs. smaller words?

Got 463, but there are some other similar ones in the Star Trek series, so librarians should have an eye out.

Google Books shows no sources prior to about 2005, and the most common attribution is "Unknown" so I have added it to Anonymous with a misattributed tag. (The alleged Carlin quote that included that text—actually from a spam forwarded email—should not have included it; the rest I have corrected and linked to the real author, Bob Moorehead)

Peter wrote: "What about new editions that have all new content added?"

My understanding, subject to revision by the PTB or employees (I'm only a Super) is that it depends on the nature of the content added. E.g., don't combine the "complete and uncut" edition of The Stand with the original edition (though it looks like someone went ahead and did that anyway, sigh). But if the someone adds a new preface to the 3rd edition, that should be combined with the 1st & 2nd Ed, since the essential text is the same (with the editions properly labeled in that field, and perhaps ensuring that the description notes something like "With a new preface by so-and-so").

Since we don't seem to know who really said/wrote it, I added a "misattributed" tag to it. Deleting it will only result in it coming back anyway, as can be seen from everything else with that tag. Deleting quotes that are popular but wrong is an exercise in futility; we can at least fix them where a fix is known, or point out that there's something wrong, but making them go away is impossible when there are thousands of people working against you.

Bernadette wrote: "I don't think there can be much doubt now that Amazon doesn't just want to compete - it wants to dominate the book selling/publishing/discussing market place"

Close, but not quite. Amazon hardly cares about books; that was just an easy place to start. They don't even make money on books, not really. The intent of Jeff Bezos is global hegemony of online commerce. All of it. If you buy it on the internet, Amazon wants to be the one to sell it to you. Everything, everywhere, hence the A->Z logo.

Moloch wrote: "I don't know if that's possible, but I'm looking for new books to rescue through all my past librarian edits[....]

Could there be a note beside each book in danger there? (Like the one on the editions page)"

Motion seconded; I've found many more in need of rescue that I've edited in the past than there are on my shelves (probably mostly because I've edited more books than I will ever, ever have time to read, even if I was interested in all of them).

Snail in Danger (Sid) wrote: "I'm hopeful that perhaps a query could be run to put books that used Google Books and other problematic sources back on the "rescue me" list."

I would think that this is something better saved for after the Amazon deadline, since Google hasn't given us a deadline, nor even noticed, yet. But I agree that it would be nice, eventually, to have a new script/page for finding and replacing data that may not have been obtained in full compliance with relevant licenses, while we have copious time to deal with it, thereby avoiding another week like this (or, worse yet, lawsuits).

rivka wrote: "Various other options that work along similar lines are being looked into."

Yay! Thanks!

(I gave the creation of a similar tool for Worldcat a shot, but my JavaScript skills are quite good enough, yet, because their URLs appear to use OCLC instead of ISBN. If I figure it out later, I'll post here.)

rivka wrote: "I have done this when possible, too. But sometimes there is no known/correct source."

Yep, that's when I just use "attributed."

BTW, for TPTB, my suggestion of adding librarian-only fields for quotes, like someone else's suggestion in another thread of allowing voting on tags (like Amazon does), is something I recognize to be WAY low priority, especially this week, and I just mention for the "would be nice if" project file.

For most of my entered books, I've been using this "Add to Goodreads" javascript bookmarklet, which has only worked to import from Amazon. In light of the recent mandate from Amazon, I would presume that I should stop using this, right? Or is it really just executing a search, and not importing data in the process?

Further, if we do have to stop using that, will GR be developing some other bookmarklet/tool/whatever to import online book data when the books is not already on GR? Or anything at all to reduce the effort (and error rate) of manual data entry? Even something that will simply recognize a book page and attempt to open the corresponding GR book page would be handy, though of course importing data GR doesn't have is handier still. And a screen-scaper for, say, Worldcat would be just lovely.

(This is essentially a repost from the hyperactive "Amazon going away" thread, where it was presumably and quite understandably overlooked.)

THere are tons and tons of quotes by obscure people that are often attributed to famous people. As someone osbcure said, "Famous words need famous mouths."

Deleting these only means deleting them again later.

When I am cleaning quotes, I generally try to move them to the correct author, if possible, and add a tag like "misattributed to Stephen King". If there is no viable true author, I just tag it "misattributed" if it is known that someone else said it, or "attributed" if there's just no proof that the linked author said it.

It may be better still if there were librarian-only fields for this kind of stuff, like maybe a "source verified" field to indicate authenticity, or an "attributed to" field to link it to the author(s) people usuallyu think said it.

Eleanor Rooseveldt in particular didn't say a lot of what she is said to have said.

Ridley wrote: "Now that librarian stuff actually takes some effort and attention to detail, will Goodreads find a way to weed out librarians who can't/won't/don't follow the rules?"

I second this motion.

Otis wrote: No, in this case it's still whats legally called a "derivative" of Amazons. We need a new source that has all the data to rescue it. But feel free to make your same corrections if they exist in the new source too.

So a couple of follow-up questions that I haven't seen asked or answered:

For most of my entered books, I've been using the "Add to Goodreads" javascript bookmarklet, which has only worked to import from Amazon. I would presume that I should stop using this, right?

Further, if we do have to stop using that, will GR be developing some other bookmarklet/tool/whatever to import online book data when the books is not already on GR? Or anything at all to reduce the effort (and error rate) of manual data entry? Even something that will simply recognize a book page and attempt to open the corresponding GR book page would be handy, though of course importing data GR doesn't have is handier still.

Meanwhile, I have rescued a few of my more obscure entries, and have a few more yet to do which seem unlikely to be in any mass import, so thanks at least for providing the rescue tool, and ensuring that it doesn't clobber other data (I've been comparing the book pages before and after, and it seems to work remarkably well).

Aha! That probably explains a lot of the "Hungarian" books I find that are actually in Italian. Not to mention all the "English" books in Spanish and German, but those struck me less weird.

Cheryl in CC NV wrote: "Well, maybe, if those fields and notes were consistently accurate and filled in."

Aye, there's the rub! A Librarian's work is never done.

I've noticed recently an increasing number of long-established author profiles being up-merged from 3- and 4-digit profile numbers into the 7-digit range, often with the name having been changed from the common version most likely to be imported from other sources to something that someone probably considers to be "more correct" or "authoritative." A notable example is the former Seneca http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/... which is now Lucius Annaeus Seneca http://www.goodreads.com/author/edits...

Arguably the latter is more technically correct, more disambiguated, and perhaps clearer. However, most seekers after Seneca won't know that this is the full name they seek, in addition to this breaking every previously-existing author link to the old profile, and causing everything subsequently imported to go under a new 7-digit Seneca link which will then have to be remerged.

Personally, when I find authors needing to be merged, I always merge down-stream (unless the profiles are only off by a few positions), to the oldest existing profile, under the presumption that the oldest is likely to be the one with the most existing links. If the name needs to be adjusted (like when the old one is "Surname, Firstname C., Surname" while the new one is the correct "Firstname C. Surname") I do the down-merges first and fix the profile name at the end of the sequence, to avoid this very issue. Is this not the current policy, Best Practice, guideline, whatever?

I'm really hoping this isn't some Librarian off on a crusade, or the author links are about to become largely useless. In the Seneca example, I can't tell who the culprit was or I'd try discussing it with them directly. It might have been Josh Clark (who at least changed the name, and generally seems to do very good work), or Benoît Gateau (who at least tired to keep a link to the old Seneca page) or Joe Ungureanu (who made a couple of profile updates, but doesn't seem to have enough edits to be the overall culprit). However, since the merges themselves do not appear to be tracked in the edit history, it could be someone entirely unlisted there.

If this is as wrong as I think, is there some way we can stop it? I recently managed to move Mark Twain back down to the 4-digit range where he belongs from a 5xxxxxx "Samuel Langhorne Clemens" entry, reconstructing the profile from the Wayback Machine, but usable 4-digit profiles are at a premium and that kind of movement is a giant PITA, as well as a waste of time if someone is only going to edit-war them back into silliness.

I know this thread is old (I was looking to see if another issue was addressed yet) but in an attempt to answer Cheryl's question from my point of view:

An abridgment is essentially an "abridged edition" of a given work, just as "2nd Expanded Edition" is in the other direction. Whereas an adaptation is a different work "based on" the original. I generally try to keep the original author as a secondary on adaptations, and (depending on what other libraries do) list the adapter as the primary. In the case of an abridgment, the fact that it's shorter should be sufficiently notable from the reduced page count, plus "(Abridged)" in the title and/or "Abridged Edition" in the Edition field, but IMHO it is fundamentally the "same" book in terms of combination here.

FTR, I have no official standing here in terms of policy making; I'm just a Super, and defer to the Librarian Manual and the PTB, including actual paid GR employees in case of disputes.

I believe this:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
should be the author linked above, but the name difference seems deliberate (3 spaces) and everything attached to him looks like a NAB. Er, what? I don't want to be merging junk into valid data, so I don't really know what to do with this.

I've picked up a lot of this project - he gets filed under other names a lot, Robert L. Stine, Robert L Stine, R.L. Stein, R. L Stine, "R.L. )ZHU ?YE QIAN YI MEI )SI TAN (Stine" (yes, really) - so merging always makes a new bunch of combines. I've handled a lot of the German (still plenty left that might not be combinable), working thru Italian now, and eventually getting back to the (ugh) Chinese. Still hovering around 1,000 works, but that might not be off by more than a couple hundred.