Books being shelved under 'Jr.' instead of last name

[Sarah (is clearing her shelves)]

Hi all, I have a number of books on my shelves, as I'm sure a number of people do, shelved under the title Jr. instead of their last name (for example Smith as in the author I've linked to this topic). I was wondering if there was anything that can be done to change this.

Thanks for your help.

[Lobstergirl]

This has been brought up before and apparently the coding fix would be difficult and onerous. You can imagine that if this were an easy thing to fix, it would have been done a long time ago.

However maybe staff will chime in - perhaps it is more doable now? Or has moved higher up the priority list?

[Lobstergirl]

Threads in the feedback group that pertain to this:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[Sarah (is clearing her shelves)]

No wonder I couldn't find the previous threads considering how old they are. *Sigh* I can see this is a complete impossibility for the tech people and will try to remember that ever time I look at authors with Jr. Sr. or double last names and feel impotent annoyance. Thanks for responding Lobstergirl.

[Lobstergirl]

You're welcome.

[Leland]

As an experiment, I tried using the HTML code for non-breaking space   as a way of concatenating the suffix with the last name. It didn't work. The code did not parse.

However, I bring this up because if the GR HTML interpreter did recognize non-breaking spaces in the author field, this would be an (admittedly awkward) workaround, at least until a more elegant solution has been coded.

[Scott]

It's a little surprising that they didn't set up the site to handle first and last names separately.

[Moloch]

I agree with all of you, I hate this thing

My usual suggestion is a "sort by" field in the authors' pages. It can even be automatically filled as it would be good for most authors (Smith, John); if not (like for "John Smith Jr.", "Gabriel Garcia Marquez"), librarians could fix it manually (Smith Jr., John; Garcia Marquez, Gabriel)

[rivka, Former Moderator]

This is not a Librarians Group issue. Suggestions for site changes belong in the Feedback Group, or you may wish to use the Contact Us link on the Help page.