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

Keith’s comments from the Goodreads Librarians Group group.

Hi rivka, thanks for that.

FTR, all U.S. Supreme Court decisions (i.e., not all SCotUS cases, since some cases get kicked without a decision) get published in a collection series called US Reports, with each volume having its own ISBN. So am I reading your statement that

"… if legal cases are published in a collection then that would meet our criteria for inclusion"

to imply that all SCotUS decisions may (but need not necessarily) be included, as they have been published in that collection?

(FWIW, I promise not to start adding the thousands of individual decisions available, and many of them haven't been published separately anyway; though the last decade or so regularly have been published separately by the Court, as you rightly note most of them aren't being read and discussed like books.)

Putting this in Questions instead of Covers because it's not just a cover issue.

Even as an experienced Super, I'm not sure about the best path forward with these in compliance with policy.

Transcendental Magic is the primary edition (of more than 60 editions) and listed as the 1968 Weiser printing; however, the cover image is clearly from the more current Weiser edition, likely with the same ISBN (though I can't prove that). The actual 1968 cover does not appear to be available anywhere online, let alone anywhere we can use as a cover image source. I have the copy I read in storage and could probably photograph it for an ACE, but this entry would still have a clearly incorrect cover attached (or, arguably, the wrong publication date for the existing cover). Either way, I'm confused about which one would get the ISBN: the most current, right? (FWIW, Amazon lists the 1968 paperback with this same wrong cover/old pub date here.)

Relatedly, this Weiser Kindle edition uses the same cover and 1968 publication date, despite the very clear fact that there was no such thing as Kindle in 1968, and I'm totally at a loss what to do there, especially given that this again appears to be sourced directly from Amazon.

Pending an answer from a more authoritative source:

If the work includes "Vocal Score" in its title (like on the cover) it probably belongs in the title field; and if not, then it doesn't.

As for primary author, I believe in the vast majority of cases it will be composer, but this may vary depending on the specific nature of the work and how it was first published. But for example, a Verdi opera is far more likely to belong under Verdi than under Francesco Maria Piave, unless it's nothing but the libretto (i.e., words and no music).

lethe wrote: "Keith wrote: "Allied questions:

1. Do we retain additional author profiles for published misspellings as well?"

Yes, we do."

Thanks, lethe, good to know. That’ll shift some of the work I’ve been doing, but may make some of the work on Tibetan Authors a little less Sisyphean.

FTR, at least two such decisions created recently also have been deleted recently:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...

Others remain, as linked in the OP above.

I'm concerned that my original question about this in the "Change to handling of non-book items" thread will get lost in the confusion of that thread, so I'm making it a new top-level question here. Aside from one fixed typo, this hatnote, and the topic line, this post is otherwise identical to that linked above.


rivka wrote: "There seems to be some confusion around what content this new rule applies to, so we just wanted to jump in and help clarify the matter."

As this policy change and the confusion around it seems to have led to a flurry of furious NABing and deletion, I could use further clarification on a corner case that is not (yet?) explicitly addressed in either the don't add list nor the valid and invalid records list linked by rivka above.

The part of the former policy that I have hitherto been extrapolating for this corner case regards shorts:

Shorts are retained in some cases. Shorts that belong are those that are:

• Published separately

• Published online as a specified short story (i.e. not a "bonus")

The corner case itself regards U.S. Supreme Court decisions. These get periodically collected and published as bound volumes with ISBN called U.S. Reports, and these massive tomes generally do make it into GR, as for example United States Reports, V. 557, Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court at October Term 2008, June 15 Through October 2, 2009, End of Term which appears to be the most recent we have—bound publication tends to lag the court by several years, and our database tends to lag publication, as the most current available volume from the GPO is 573 according to the official GPO book sale page.

Until the time of binding and official aggregate publication, people obviously need access to these often-precedential opinions, and so they tend to be individually published online, both with and without paywalls, such as through FindLaw, several law schools such as Cornell and the Supreme Court's own website. Generally speaking, these are what people actually read—it is a rare sort of geek who would sit down with a 1,600-page book of legal decisions and plow through the whole thing, which is why few of those bound volumes have ratings or reviews.

Both before and after binding, these decisions also often get published as standalone print books if they are important enough (e.g., Obergefell v Hodges, and Roe v. Wade Decision: The Complete Text) and occasionally in anthologies by topic (e.g., 50 Most Cited US Supreme Court Decisions and First Amendment: Historic Supreme Court Decisions). Just as is true for short stories, which our present policy does explicitly address.

So it would seem to me that these individually published decisions, which are often book length (typically 60–200 pages), while non-fiction rather than fiction and while not (yet) having an ISBN, often are or amount to "shorts" that are "published separately," and "published online," but not "only available via subscription," and that they therefore should be retained. And while we do still have some that have been added in the past (e.g., Davis v. United States, Decision and Opinions), the one I spent this week reading and was about to complete and review this morning got deleted just since yesterday. Evidence of the previous existence of Whole Woman's Health v Hellerstedt remains in the librarian edits, but of course without a book record there is no way to determine who deleted it or when (unless that is accessible to employees on the back end), nor to flag that deletion for review.

So can we get a definitive interpretation or policy on whether the online PDF versions of pre- and/or post-ISBN individual Supreme Court decisions do or do not belong before I waste more time in an edit war with busybodies launched from this new and poorly-understood NAB policy?

Allied questions:

1. Do we retain additional author profiles for published misspellings as well? To keep the example parallel, if the cover says "Antin Pavlovich Checkov" would we merge that to "Anton Pavlovich Chekhov" (which, BTW, has already disappeared, probably merged into Anton Chekhov") or just add "Anton Chekov" as Primary and retain Antin as Secondary?

2. Every once in a while, Kessinger or Forgotten Books puts a book out with the wrong author name on the cover (often attributing to a later translator or editor whom we would normally treat as a secondary author). Is there an "official" way to handle these?

These PD-OCR books are a plague, and their author attributions likewise.

If I'm actually feeling like fixing things, I generally make an effort to find out what was on the book originally, and presume that to be "authorial intent." The spell-out version (often with embedded dates, ugh) is usually post-hoc marketing cruft. And often, if the "canonical" name and the expanded name are too similar, you can't add both to the book record anyway, or at least not without much hoop jumping.

Arenda wrote: "I find it most clear to add a bio (when available) to the primary/default author profile for that author, and a Librarian note and a link in the description on the variant author profile."

Yeah, I try to always to this when I'm pretty sure I'm working on what should be the "canonical" record, and if there are subrecords I will often try to link them from that master (such as, SoAndSo, who also published as bracket-author-colon-LinkedSubAuthorRecord-pipe-number-bracket, was Professor of Underwater Basket Weaving at a defunct religious college, and an obscure author you wouldn't know about but for the PD-POD-OCR trash-press industry…)

In the absence of a more specific Ruling From On High, I would think the controlling policy is from the don't add list:

Shorts are retained in some cases. Shorts that belong are those that are:

• Published separately

• Published online as a specified short story (i.e. not a "bonus")

Since Wikisource is not "only available via subscription," it would seem to me that such shorts are as much "published separately" as they would be on any other website, such as TOR or Gutenberg. The question of whether it's "separate" would seem to turn on whether it has its own unique URL (as opposed to a story embedded in a page of multiple stories, which might then instead count as an anthology).

All that said, such a policy seems sure to lead to widespread micro-cruft, so hopefully TPTB will advise and update the Librarian Manual accordingly.

rivka wrote: "There seems to be some confusion around what content this new rule applies to, so we just wanted to jump in and help clarify the matter."

As this policy change and the confusion around it seems to have led to a flurry of furious NABing and deletion, I could use further clarification on a corner case that is not (yet?) explicitly addressed in either the don't add list nor the valid and invalid records list linked by rivka above.

The part of the former policy that I have hitherto been extrapolating for this corner case regards shorts:

Shorts are retained in some cases. Shorts that belong are those that are:

• Published separately

• Published online as a specified short story (i.e. not a "bonus")

The corner case itself regards U.S. Supreme Court decisions. These get periodically collected and published as bound volumes with ISBN called U.S. Reports, and these massive tomes generally do make it into GR, as for example United States Reports, V. 557, Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court at October Term 2008, June 15 Through October 2, 2009, End of Term which appears to be the most recent we have—bound publication tends to lag the court by several years, and our database tends to lag publication, as the most current available volume from the GPO is 573 according to the official GPO book sale page.

Until the time of binding and official aggregate publication, people obviously need access to these often-precedential opinions, and so they tend to be individually published online, both with and without paywalls, such as through FindLaw, several law schools such as Cornell and the Supreme Court's own website. Generally speaking, these are what people actually read—it is a rare sort of geek who would sit down with a 1,600-page book of legal decisions and plow through the whole thing, which is why few of those bound volumes have ratings or reviews.

Both before and after binding, these decisions also often get published as standalone print books if they are important enough (e.g., Obergefell v Hodges, and Roe v. Wade Decision: The Complete Text) and occasionally in anthologies by topic (e.g., 50 Most Cited US Supreme Court Decisions and First Amendment: Historic Supreme Court Decisions). Just as is true for short stories, which our present policy does explicitly address.

So it would seem to me that these individually published decisions, which are often book length (typically 60–200 pages), while non-fiction rather than fiction and while not (yet) having an ISBN, often are or amount to "shorts" that are "published separately," and "published online," but not "only available via subscription," and that they therefore should be retained. And while we do still have some that have been added in the past (e.g., Davis v. United States, Decision and Opinions), the one I spent this week reading and was about to complete and review this morning got deleted just since yesterday. Evidence of the previous existence of Whole Woman's Health v Hellerstedt remains in the librarian edits, but of course without a book record there is no way to determine who deleted it or when (unless that is accessible to employees on the back end), nor to flag that deletion for review.

So can we get a definitive interpretation or policy on whether the online PDF versions of pre- and/or post-ISBN individula Supreme Court decisions do or do not belong before I waste more time in an edit war with busybodies launched from this new and poorly-understood NAB policy?

Mary wrote: "Thanks for sending the update. What are non-book items?"

The linked Librarian Manual section gives the following examples of what is not-a-book, among others that are a bit more obscure:

• easel
• movies (DVD or VHS)
• television episodes
• music (esp soundtracks) (but not bound sheet music)
• stationery
• posters
• board games
• tshirts
• toys
• stuffed animals/dolls
• bookmarks
• stickers
• puzzles (as opposed to puzzle books)
• video games (including visual novels)
• zines

Those used to get deleted out of hand; now, if they have reviews, they will get labeled as "not a book" instead of simply being deleted (if I read aright).

rivka wrote: "…should now only be deleted if they have zero text reviews."

To clarify: if an entry in a review field is clearly spam—either unrelated to the (not-a-)book itself, or more spam by the spam author of the spam not-a-book—that counts zero toward the review count, and the record may still be deleted, yes?

Mantvydas wrote: "Is this a series?

https://www.goodreads.com/series/3089..."

It's difficult for me to be certain without being able to read Polish, but from what I can tell of library records, this does appear to meet the Goodreads definition of a non-fiction series. (If these are fiction, which they do not seem to be, then I don't think it would meet the fiction-series criteria, but that is even more difficult to determine without knowing the language.)

EDIT: I take that back—judging from the fact that Planet of Slums was first published in English outside of that Polish series, this would NOT qualify as a non-fiction series, and should at best be treated as a publisher's imprint (which I believe means series title optionally in parentheses in the Title field, and a Listopia created if someone wants to retain the collection in an accessible form and feels like putting in the work).

Liz V. wrote: "Hi Keith.

Walter Y. Evans-Wentz appears only once, albeit on a book with 450 plus editions. All other books have W.Y. Evans-Wentz, at least for now, and [author:W..."

That’s only because I keep cleaning it up, which I spent about 2 hours doing after the above post. Variants come in regularly with different punctuation; no hyphen, one period, space after period, interpolated dates, etc. Like for most popular PD authors, but in this case complicated by being associated with other popular authors and Tibetan names.

Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "Walter Y. Evans-Wentz needs to stay as more spelled out."

FWIW, I've worked a lot on Evans-Wentz. He will forever be a problem, but the "main" record should remain W.Y. Evans Wentz, which will need perpetual combining from all of the imported variants, which will continually reappear. He is Sisyphus in person.

Lilly wrote: "So what do you propose I should do about it? Just leave the collection numbering in the title? Or is there an official way to mark a complete edition?"

IMO, you've already fulfilled your duty on that one, but I'm no authority. If you feel like it, you could create a list for them, but I don't expect that would be particularly useful to anyone, and you're under no obligation at all. If you do decide to create a list, I'd recommend checking the "Static list" box so it doesn't accumulate unrelated cruft.

In 940, Lilly wrote: "Hi, I have posted a request in the series section of this group and have been trying to analyse why it got a lot of views but no response. - And I think part of the problem might be that, like me, ..."

The one you linked to looked right to me: number in the title, but not added to a Series page because it does not meet the GR definition of a Series (i.e., and of those works could be, and have been, packaged in different combinations and orders with different numbering in near-infinite variety).

This clearly does not qualify as a series under GR rules (at least not as I understand them):

https://www.goodreads.com/series/1147...

What do we do with that? Just delete the series record? It doesn't seem worthy even of a list.

Thanks for that update, Carlo.

It seems that the original quote link that I updated to Bob Moorehead above was deleted in the intervening nine years, but one now exists for Corona:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/598139

I have tagged a few others that make use of the quote embedded in quotes of their own:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/...

I am in the process of correcting and merging several other misattributions, including three different variations for Maya Angelou, along with Ajay K. Pandey and Jillian Dodd.

Liz V. wrote: "More thanks Keith.

I've not devoted a decade, but the rate of re-imports and introduction of other problems are disheartening."

Cheer up, Sisyphus; it's only a boulder. ;-)