Deletions of Rowling Releases

[Steph]

Today I glanced at my completed 2014 reading challenge, and was jarred to realize that the number of books read had gone down. After a bit of searching, I realized that this is because two recent J.K. Rowling releases - originally titled Harry Potter: The Prequel and Dumbledore’s Army Reunites... - have been deleted from goodreads.

I understand why they might be deleted. They are short pieces, not officially released as books. But it's troubling that my ratings and reviews are gone, and now my reading challenge was technically not completed.

So.... is there anything that can be done about this? Can our reviews of these titles be recovered? And, since apparently their existence bothered someone so much, maybe they could be added to a separate 'Potter-extras' series?

[Monique]

Steph, ratings and reviews for deleted works cannot be recovered, so far as I know. Sometimes an item is merged, meaning it is combined with an edition of a work before it is deleted. I noticed there is a listing of The Prequel which suggests that the story is about Sirius and James so I doubt anyone would have merged it before deleting but you can look and see if you have more than one review of a full Harry Potter book, just in case.

I'd have to do some digging to determine if either of these fit the rules for Goodreads shorts. Do you happen to have links to the actual published locations?

[Steph]

Ah, I didn't realize there was a set of rules determining what can stay on goodreads as a short, but that makes sense. Thanks for the info.

I know The Prequel was written for charity in 2008, but I'm not sure where it was originally posted. It can be viewed here.

The latter story was published on the Pottermore site last year. I don't have the official link, but the story can be viewed here.

Since these aren't the original locations, it's probably not very helpful.... but that's all I can find, unfortunately.

[Monique]

Steph,

Preliminary investigation strongly suggests that the Dumbledore's Army piece would not fit the profile for a short story. I need to do more research on the Prequel piece though and try to find it's exact provenance.

[Renske]

As far as I know the issue with the prequel is that is not published in a way that counts as published by the Goodreads policies.

[Steph]

Thanks very much for your help! I'm glad to know this.

[lethe]

#8 - it's on the first page, 7th from the bottom: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list...

It looks like it was re-added back in February.

[Jim]

This seems to be indicative of something that is problematic on Goodreads. I don't know that there's a simple answer, but it deserves discussion.

People spend a lot of time reviewing and rating items here that they think are books (i.e., short stories, comics, etc.), but maybe be certain strict rules they are NAB. Then a well-intentioned librarian comes along, says "these aren't books by Goodreads rules" and deletes them. Or merges them.

Suddenly a lot of people's hard work and writing and reviewing has simply disappeared. That seems like something, as a community, we would want to avoid. What could we do to make this system work differently?

Steph started this because her reviews had disappeared. And it looks like it may have happened to Beth. Of course, someone else disagrees whether or not they are NAB and adds them back.

Like I said - I don't know what the answer is, but I would think we would want to have a process that doesn't suddenly delete someone's hard work. I understand that these are often NAB, so need to be removed from the database. But sometimes that's a little gray.

What do you think? Should this be a separate thread?

[Jim]

This very nearly happened to me with Kingdom Come and Kingdom Come.

(Not the exact same thing, but an example on how librarians sometimes misinterpret things and may mistakenly delete or merge books resulting in lost work.)

I had these two separate books as "Read" on my bookshelf. One day I noticed that they were not 2 separate works, but were combined as 2 editions of the same work. However, the first is a 4-part comic book collected into a Trade Paperback, written by Mark Waid and drawn by Alex Ross. The second is a novel adaptation of the original work written by Elliot S. Maggin. I alerted a librarian and it was quickly fixed. But it seems to be too easy to for one of us (who means well and is trying to follow the rules) to mistakenly "fix" something that could result in someone's lost work.

[Elizabeth (Alaska)]

Only super-librarians can delete books that have been added/rated, so it's not like just any old (or young) librarian can go about deleting those books willy-nilly.