Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
Questions (not edit requests)
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Differentiating same name authors
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Edit the books that need to be moved (make sure you edit all editions) and add another space between Diane and Ryan. That will move them from her profile. Since "Diane Ryan" is not a very unique name, there's a good chance there is already another author with the Diane^^Ryan profile. If that's also not the right author, you keep adding spaces as needed, to move them to a unique profile.
On a non-claimed profile, you can do this in bulk using the disambiguate authors link from the author profile edit page. You can also see from the similar authors link on the same page, how many other Diane Ryans there are, and how many spaces they have, so you can figure out which books may need moving where.
Separating authors with the same name:
https://www.goodreads.com/help/show/2...
THANK YOU! I figured there had to be directions somewhere but I failed to find them.
NP. Took me a couple of minutes of looking to find them, and I knew more or less where they were!It's a heck of a lot harder when the profile you're moving from is claimed, since you can't get at the handy tools, and you have to do them one by one! It's not too hard though, just fiddly.
Actually it wouldn't let me use the tools because the author to move them to is GR so they gave me an error. But only 2 there. Had to do similar for another author who has umlaut in her name and had several of her books stuck under an unclaimed without the umlaut. It wouldn't let me modify the name on the unclaimed to hers or use the tools. She apparently couldn't claim the "wrong" one when she asked earlier today, so I did it the complicated way. The Goodread author rules do make some things pretty complicated.... and some don't want to deal with being librarians... they just want to write their books. So it would be easier if they could at least authorize a few librarians they know to be able to make these changes for them. I can merge books on a Goodreads author, so why can't I rename a misspelled alternative profile to merge with them or use tools to sort their books out of similar name profile?
I have a similar issue. I have seen many posts about the fact that two authors with the same name should be created with varying numbers of spaces in the name, but I still don't know how to solve this situation. Two profiles seem to have the same number of spaces.There are at least two Mark Russell's.
General: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
Comic book author:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
The following books should be moved to the comic book author, but I can't figure out how to do it. It looks like both author profiles have the same number of spaces in their names.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7...
How can I move them?
#6 Apart from the similar names page, you can only see the number of spaces on edit pages. Mark Russell the comic-book author has 3 spaces.
Rebecca wrote: "and some don't want to deal with being librarians... they just want to write their books."If they don't want to have control over their author profile I see little point in them claiming it. Goodreads author profiles can only be edited by the author themselves, or Support. For the 'why' you'll need to ask Goodreads.
lethe wrote: "Rebecca wrote: "and some don't want to deal with being librarians... they just want to write their books."If they don't want to have control over their author profile I see little point in them c..."
This. Don't claim it unless you plan to manage it and use it, there's no point, and then when you ask the librarians to do it, it's just more complicated.
Re #5, staff can merge non-claimed into claimed accounts. There's a whole big thread for posting them, it's usually done in a day or two. https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
#6: Moved several books to the comic author's profile.#1 & 5: If you, or the author, post which books need to be moved, we can move them.
They've claimed their pages and happily maintain those. The point was to get books that were theirs off of other pages. Can they do that without being a librarian? I did not know that. They had added all their books, but when searching to post reviews, other copies came up that weren't linked to them properly. I thought only librarians could move those.
If they post on this group, books are generally moved (in either direction) within a few minutes, it's no big deal either direction. If you look around the group, especially in the book issues folder, we take care of dozens of these requests every day.They could move books off their profiles, the same way we do. They can't move books to their profiles however, because they can only edit the books already on there.
Thanks. It sounds like the one author posted the wrong place when I suggested she do so, so had gotten wrong information. I now bookmarked the right thread, so next time things get imported wrong we can ask again about merging. Thank you for the help filling in the details. I am a bit out-of-date with my librarian-related knowledge, as I've been less active lately.
I am trying to fix this on behalf of the Goodreads author, who doesn't have tons of time for messing with this sort of thing. If I can't do this as a regular librarian because of the Goodreads author status, I will give her the specific directions of what to do.
I am guessing the trick has something to do with the author name field. Can someone tell me how to do this, as I expect it easily might happen for this author again in the future?
Considering that same name authors do happen, perhaps something could be added to the librarian manual about differentiating authors when editing book data?
If this has to be done by some sort of super librarian, the book I know about for sure is "Talking to Luke." I am unsure if "Wingspan" also shows up in the generic unclaimed profile.