Disambiguation: Add a librarian's note as well?

[Cait]

When disambiguating authors, there is a note that is put in the author's bio so that people who view the author's page will see that this author name is duplicated. I'd like to suggest putting in a librarian note on the author profile as well, so that the disambig is visible on the combine page. For two-space Jane Doe, where this Jane Doe is a historian, I'd put:

This is Jane^^Doe, history

This has two benefits:
(1) It's visible from the combine page. I know that I often jump right to an author's combine page when working on a specific book and wouldn't see a bio note until later.
(2) It contains the same short description of the author's area which will be used in the "master list of disambiguated authors" post, which can help clarify which books go where for the next librarian to come along working on these authors.

It's a extra step, but a quick one -- the author profile already has to be edited to put in the note in the bio, so this is just one more thing to add while its open for editing.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Makes sense to me. But I am so not volunteering to go in and add it to all the existing disambig'ed authors! ;)

[mlady_rebecca]

Is your goal to catch new imports of books that belong in a different author profile?

[Cait]

mlady_rebecca wrote: "Is your goal to catch new imports of books that belong in a different author profile?"

Yes -- since new books for Jane^^Doe will typically come in on the Jane^Doe profile, disambig is an ongoing process for most authors. (Actually putting in links to the other Jane Doe profiles would be the best way to set things up for the next round, but that's probably a prohibitive amount of work! At least this way the librarian will know to go check the master list if there's a puzzling book in the midst....)

[mlady_rebecca]

Okay, that makes sense. Just have to program myself to add that additional step.