Keith’s
Comments
(group member since Sep 19, 2008)
Keith’s
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from the Goodreads Librarians Group group.
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Mur Lafferty (editor) to GR author Mur Lafferty - I tried to notify the author directly, but she's not accepting messages.
Done.
If been working on cleaning up The Log Cabin Lady. It was listed under a variety of non-Authors, which (mistake #1?) I changed to Anonymous. Then I tried to combine them, which was a pain because there are so many books there. Once I found them all, attempts to combine failed - the icon just spins and spins going nowhere.So, aha! I thought. I have a cunning plan! The combiner is probably choking on the size of the Anonymous record, so I'll move them all to AnonymousLCL, combine them there, and remerge AnonymousLCL back into the main Anonymous. Alas, this is perhaps mistake #2, as the combiner still fails in the same manner.
So is the combiner broken? Is it just me? Do I need help from a super-librarian? Should I have given up and gone home hours ago?
EDIT: According to this thread on Feedback the combiner is down. I'll get back to fixing the last of these edits once it's back up.
The Anonymous profile says:Books can be attributed to "Anonymous" for several reasons:
* They are officially published under that name
* They are traditional stories not attributed to a specific author
* They are religious texts not generally attributed to a specific author
Books whose authorship is merely uncertain should be attributed to "Unknown".
Meanwhile, the Unknown profile says:
Books can be attributed to "Unknown" when the author or editor (as applicable) is not known and cannot be discovered. If at all possible, list at least one actual author or editor for a book.
Books whose authorship is purposefully withheld should be attributed instead to "Anonymous".
Now it seems to me that the final statement there is correct: an unknown author who deliberately and permanently withholds their name AND is undiscoverable is almost the definition of Anonymous. Yet this appears to conflict with the existing profile definition on the Anonymous profile. Official position from the PTB?
What led me to this question is Unsafe at Any Altitude, which IMHO should be moved from Unknown to Anonymous (and from there to the crackpot bin, but that's a separate issue).
Probably a bit late to the game, but isn't this covered effectively already by allowing quotes tied to books, and showing "Quotes from this book" on the book page? That feature could work better, but the proposal above seems somehow redundant to current function.
Done, but it looks like someone deleted it after me. I think it had an ISBN, so I expect it'll be back.
In case anyone cares or is keeping score, I am slowly working my way thru:Crown (publisher sometimes claims author credit)
Simon (I know the legit SNA well)
Smith (Is there a legit SNA for this one?)
EDIT: Simon is now clean, and updated on Amazon as well.
Found this while I was cleaning up the C.S. Lewis books and quotes:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11...
It has an ISBN, but appears to be a DVD (and thus NAB, right?) Not quite sure what to do with it.
Well, this explains why the Nobel listing got emptied since last I looked at it. Otis, might it be worth developing a second type of entry (probably have to call it a Prize instead of an Award just to keep the database records from colliding) for those which are given to authors? This will keep people from "helpfully" restocking the Nobel listings again, by forcing Nobel to tie to an Author page instead of accepting a Book page.I note that there are currently five slowly-repopulating Nobel entries:
Nobelova nagrada 2 books
le prix Nobel de littérature 1 book
Nobel Literature Prize 1 book
Nobel 1 book
Nobel Prize 0 books
Meanwhile, back to cleaning the Pulitzer listings.
I ran a search against the forum to see if anyone was aware of this and didn't find anything. The "most popular" edition of this is The Castle (Dramatization) (Paperback) presumably simply because it was, quite unfortunately, the first one entered. Unfortunately because, in all probability, not one of the 3,253 reviews entered is actually of this 59-page script from 2001, but rather of any of the myriad editions of the actual novel.Unfortunately too, while I know exactly what data would have to be added to the record to cut down the confusion, "you can't separate the most popular edition of a work." So it's stuck there unless every other edition is separated from it and recombined into another listing - which will assuredly be re-combined into this one again, recreating the same problem.
I'm a very part-time librarian here, so I ask, hat in hand: does anyone else have a better solution? This all seems rather ironically Kafkaesque.
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/...Currently attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt with 170+ votes, but more correctly attributable to Van Buren Hoover, who is not in the database, even under his pen name Martin Vanbee, because he was a magazine editor, not a book writer. But as "famous quotes need famous mouths," it is much more often attributed to Roosevelt uncited.
So, do we delete it because it's NAB? Or reattribute to the correct author? If so, under which name?
I'm not positive about this one:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34...
It appears that some bad data got into a database somewhere (Abe or Amazon?) and spread to other databases. No such entry that I can find in isbndb or Library of Congress, but that may reflect more on my skills than on the book itself.
On a related note, somehow all the editions of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe get filed under the less-than-canonical title of Dr. Faustus, perhaps because the master edition is the Dover Thrift Edition for whatever reason. Is it possible to canonicalize it, or should we just put up with it as a minor issue?
I haven't been able to find anything regarding a standard for publisher data entry, and I find myself sometimes confused regarding houses and imprints. Like in my old days working with music labels, the relationships can be complex.For example, I just added The Giver to my Currently Reading, in the mass market edition. The data page notes "Published by Dell Laurel-Leaf, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, a division of Random House, Inc." and further that it is "Reprinted by arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company." So I updated the existing publisher from "Laurel Leaf" to "Dell Laurel-Leaf," but it could just as easily be:
-Random House
-Random House Children's Books
-Dell
-Dell Laurel-Leaf/Random House
or any of a number of other variations. Do we have a standard? Do we want a standard? Does it matter much? Does this field get used for anything other than human-readable supplementary information?
Advice from the experienced appreciated; I am a relative n00b here.
Speaking of "First Published" errors, before I go mucking anything up, should that reflect the first publication date of the text of the book, or the first publication of that specific *edition* of the book? I could easily see arguments either way, and the Librarian Manual doesn't seem to address this issue. Hard to standardize if we're not all following the same standard.
