Why are covers being changed on shelved editions, and ACEs created for the old covers?

[Antonomasia]

Rather than leaving them as they were, and creating the ACE for the cover that was not already on the edition with a lot of shelvings?

i.e. to keep the cover you shelved, you need to switch edition

This is to generally raise the issue as policy and practice. It happens from time to time anyway and it's a bit frustrating. But I'm mentioning right now because it also relates to a particular instance, where supers had been working on a book I had shelved and this led to the edition cover being changed as described.

[Paula]

If you have concerns about edits please flag those edits with explanation so staff can take a look.

ACE editions should be added for new covers and covers should not be changed as you described on published books with the old edition being marked as the ACE.

there may be exceptions wbut I cannot think of any off the top of my head

[Antonomasia]

That isn't something I'd do lightly, so I've been looking through the edition's edit history, which turns out to be very complex with several cover additions and reversions over several years. I think it falls into the 'life's too short' category

If a cover addition had not been the original one for years, and hundreds of people had added the book with that cover (more people than added it with the first one, due to the site getting bigger) I think there is an argument for keeping the one that more people added. But given how much work it takes to ascertain the actual numbers for something like that, and that the software doesn't provide an alternative to manual counting, it doesn't seem likely that policy would change.

Another thing that's unlikely to be changed soon, but if only the histories were able to display thumbnails of old images, that would solve a lot of problems. (Even where change comments are present, and they aren't usually, it would help a lot.)

At least finding altered covers among shelved books doesn't happen as often as it used to a few years ago.

[lethe]

Antonomasia wrote: "Another thing that's unlikely to be changed soon, but if only the histories were able to display thumbnails of old images, that would solve a lot of problems. (Even where change comments are present, and they aren't usually, it would help a lot.)"

Oh YES. That would be great. It is so annoying to have to revert a cover change to see if it was replaced against policy, never mind the confusion it causes in the changelog.

[lethe]

Antonomasia wrote: "supers had been working on a book I had shelved and this led to the edition cover being changed as described."

Could it be the edition you had shelved had the wrong cover to start with and it was corrected later?

If a cover addition had not been the original one for years, and hundreds of people had added the book with that cover (more people than added it with the first one, due to the site getting bigger) I think there is an argument for keeping the one that more people added.

I think that does happen, especially if the cover was changed years ago.

[Antonomasia]

lethe wrote: "Could it be the edition you had shelved had the wrong cover to start with and it was corrected later?"
Well, it had had the cover I shelved since 2013. It had then been reverted fairly recently to a cover added a few months before that. (It's not clear if the one reverted to was even the first cover, which was added earlier again. Though the first cover might have just been a lower quality pic of the one it was reverted to. Reading the history, it started to seem too complicated to be worth it.)
"My" cover wasn't wrong for the edition, because it had the right ISBN. It just seemed to be a case of where in the GR edition 'hierarchy' (based on addition date) that cover design - among 2 or 3 editions with that ISBN - belonged, and it got moved to a different edition.

[Michael]

I would like to know the general practice on reverting the edits. Does it apply to all the edits or only those which were done xx months ago?

While working on merges I come across editions where cover changes would have been done against policy and as the policy states, I'd revert the changes and replace existing cover2 with old cover1. If the covers match, I merge the duplicate. If the covers don't match, I create an ACE for cover2. But a lot of users would have shelved cover2 already between the time cover1 was replaced with cover2 and I revert those changes. What should be done in such cases? Ideally, covers should never* be replaced but we don't live in an ideal world so there would be instances where librarians** would replace covers against policy *shrugs*

* - except in those rare cases where the wrong cover was added first for a particular ISBN
** - assuming only librarians have access to change covers since last few years

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Michael wrote: "I would like to know the general practice on reverting the edits. Does it apply to all the edits or only those which were done xx months ago?"

It's a judgment call. But I generally will revert even ones that are 2-3 years old, unless it is a very popular book.