Why some books are "locked"?

[Moloch]

Just a question: I sometimes find duplicates that, even though they have been shelved by less than 5 users, I can't merge and delete because "this book is locked, only superlibrarians can delete it".

I was wondering, why is it so? I would expect it for books where maybe there was some edit war between librarians, or that authors tried to vandalize by changing the covers, etc, but this has happened to me with rather obscure books (last case, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1... a duplicate with a wrong ISBN reported for deletion, so it may disappear any time: a 1988 Italian edition of "Journey to the end of night" by Céline) and I can't find a reason why locking is necessary

Do books sometimes get locked "accidentally", is it some kind of bug, or is it always decided by the staff?
Thanks

[Moloch]

In that book I mentioned, the only "interesting" thing in the log is that the user who entered it has deleted their account: is it somehow related perhaps?

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Locking is an automated process, not a manual one. As we start to import books from Amazon, when we find a match (generally based on ASIN or ISBN, plus at least one match between other data elements like author and title), that record is locked because it has a secondary validation.

However, because we know that sometimes even such matched books may need merging, we have enabled superlibrarian deletes of these items.

Which books get locked is still in flux, as we look at various options for managing metadata importing of books that already have records on Goodreads.

[MissJessie]

Amazon data being so famously complete, correct, current, etc.

Wonderful. Thank God for LibraryThing.

[Karma♥Bites ^.~]

Moloch wrote: "In that book I mentioned, the only "interesting" thing in the log is that the user who entered it has deleted their account: is it somehow related perhaps?"


FWIW, I've been noticing 'Deleted Member' notation more and more in the edit pages so started to pay more attention. Noticed the other day that the same designation showed for me immediately after combining and deleting a dup edition.

New glitch? Doesn't seem right to me but then... *shrug*

[MissJessie]

Perhaps GR is just anticipating.....

[Karma♥Bites ^.~]

MissJessie wrote: "Perhaps GR is just anticipating....."

Erm... should I be worried, MissJessie? ;-)

[MissJessie]

Well, I live in constant fear : )

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Karma♥Bites ^.~ wrote: "I've been noticing 'Deleted Member' notation more and more in the edit pages so started to pay more attention. Noticed the other day that the same designation showed for me immediately after combining and deleting a dup edition."

That's a side effect of the delayed deletion process and we already have someone looking into fixing that.

[Karma♥Bites ^.~]

Ah, thanks for the confirm, rivka. I hesitated to mention when I first noticed it but then decided to speak up due to increasing frequency and Moloch's post.