These authors could use work

[Lisa]

Brandy, Thanks so much. Changing the author was the main thing. I'm leaving the titles as they are. I still can't properly see the book. But now I can go to that author and combine what can be combined. I really appreciate you changing the author's name. A big help!

P.S. And that particular book is the only edition of it, so no need to combine. Brandy, you did everything the entry needed. Thank you again.

[Lisa]

Re message #29: exactly 1/2 of the books are done. Yay! But I have to stop for the weekend. But a lot done by the GR librarians in 2 1/2 days.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Brandy, I don't combine "Selections from [Author]" or the like unless I'm pretty sure. But something that claims to be all of an author's work should be safe to combine with other volumes making the same claim. In my opinion, anyway.

Oh, and only 684 left! You guys RAWK! :D

[rivka, Former Moderator]

I probably should wait, but I'll forget . . .

More fun!

[Lisa]

Well, Rivka, # 54 made me laugh. (I guess that I have a warped sense of humor.) I have a feeling there will be more of these.

[Lisa]

Rivka, More weirdness... I combined 2 from the # 54 "author." One was William Shakespeare and one was Mark Twain. And they changed, but they're still in the Rh Value Publishing list? Guess it could be a delayed reaction/caching thing? But that didn't happen with the "Michigan" author. I think I'll stop for now until I hear from one of the official GR librarians.

Edit: Ah, just checked again and I believe those 2 books finally disappeared off Rh Value Publishing. Yay! (I should learn to wait to post glitches as things usually do resolve themselves. But, since it hadn't happened at all with Michigan...) Anyway, I think that all is ok. Sorry for the false alarm.

And those Rh Value people do not know how to spell!

[rivka, Former Moderator]

It's a caching thing. I've had it sometimes with the "Michigan" list too.

[Brandy]

Lewis Carroll is as done as he's going to get, unless someone has every version of "Best of ____" or "Selections from ____" in front of them to verify contents. Final tally: 86 distinct works, including 432 Alice in Wonderlands! Also, I went through GoodReads and fixed every Lewis/Louis Carol/Caroll/Carrol to the proper spelling. He is done, done, done.

Now to pitch in with the Michigan Group!

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Good job, Brandy! :)

[rivka, Former Moderator]

>_<

Sisyphus, I swear.

[This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For]

*bangs head against desk*

And the Michigan Historical Reprint Series had just gotten down to 500...

[Lisa]

Rivka, How are you even finding all of these?! I'm surprised that we didn't see them sooner. And, I assume that there will be more. :-( And new ones will get added periodically as well. Too bad Goodreads can't determine the form in which these books get added. Anyway, I'll continue to work on them periodically.

I was thinking maybe there should be another sticky post in this folder with one post for each one of these. Will make it easier for GR librarians to find them. As time goes on, looking through this thread, if it continues to get much longer which I assume it will, it might become easy to miss these series.

Just a suggestion.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Rivka, How are you even finding all of these?!

First I tried to find all the Ivanhoes. Then it was something else.

There were a couple with a dozen each; I cleaned those up. Except I think I misplaced one . . .


I was thinking maybe there should be another sticky post in this folder with one post for each one of these.

Good thought. I'll do that shortly.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Ok, done. If anyone finds any more (*wince*), post 'em here and I'll put a link in the other thread.

I locked it to prevent it getting cluttered; let's use this one for comments, etc.

As well as any minor "authors needing work" posts.

[Lasairfiona]

Okay. I took Robert Louis Stevenson Down from ~422 to 265. I'm done for now. Someone else can dig through it now. Whew!

[Brandy]

I think tk might be a publisher, not a real author...? I can't figure out WHAT this is, actually. Sadly, I don't have time right now to fix the 150 or so entries, but it's on the universal to-do list.

[This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For]

Well tk is not the publisher, but every book appears to have some sort of connection to Disney. It's possible that the letters refer to an illustrator, but I suspect it's simply a Disney database error.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

No idea what "tk" stands for, but looks like those are all from Disney. At least a couple have an author listed now in the Amazon database, so check there.

[Brandy]

I noticed it on Ned Vizzini's It's Kind of a Funny Story, so I don't think it's an illustrator (since the only illustration was the cover). If it's not all sorted out by the next time I have some time on my hands, I'll come back to it. Thanks for adding it to the list!

[Karl]

I'm guessing "tk" is something we'll have to live with. I pulled up a few random titles on Amazon and could find nothing there that would indicate who wrote these. Maybe if you had the physical book it would say somewhere within about an author? Even the website for Disney Press shows no author information about any of these titles.

[This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For]

Actually, in a sense Amazon is a bad choice since most of the data was imported from there. Try Barnes and Noble. Of the 30 or so I looked at last night, it had some sort of author information for maybe 40%.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Several I checked did have authors on Amazon, but I might have gotten lucky. ;)

Barnes and Noble is a good suggestion. Also try Powells, and just Googling the title and/or ISBN sometimes gets results.

Of course, some of them really don't have any author of record, and they should probably have Disney listed as the author.

[This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For]

BTW, for those working on the Michigan Historical Reprint Series, in case you haven't already discovered it, the majority of these books are available online at GoogleBooks, with the full correct author name (as well as year of publication, etc.). In most cases you can actually see images of the entire book (actually taken from the Michigan scanned archives), allowing corrections of not just the author, but also title, publishing information, etc., if you should be so inclined.

For example, The history of Pittsburgh, with a brief notice of its facilities of communication, and other advantages for commercial and manufacturing purposes. With two maps can be viewed here.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Excellent. Thanks, Michael!

[Melody]

Not sure what we should do about this listed as an author.

The Refined Sugars

[This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For]

Re: The Refined Sugars

This is not actually that big a deal, since this is a consortium who publishes the works and consortium names are legitimate. The one issue is that the name should be "The Refined Sugars and Other Products of Refined Beet and Cane Research Group" rather than being split into three separate authors (Amazon database error; it automatically saw the word "and" and assumed that meant different authors rather than part of a larger title), but fixing that won't be that big a deal.

[This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For]

Actually, this leads to a question. Having fixed the authorship of the 15 books by The Refined Sugars, Other Products of Refined Beet, and Cane Research Group, do these authors ever get eliminated from the database (since they now have zero books) or do they get maintained? Is there a way to clean up the database and remove authors with zero books or does it happen automatically?

[Melody]

Thanks for clearing that up, Michael. And I've wondered about the answer to your question myself.

[Melody]

BUT I see that these publications are also listed under Philip M. Parker

[Melody]

Nope - sorry - they're similar - but not identical.

[David]

There is a book for Robert B. Parker listed as "Spenser Series". It has no data listed with it, no ISBN, nothing. I checked Amazon and it doesn't appear to exist.

However, it has a few reviews listed with it and requires Super Status to delete. Could someone please look at it?

Thanks.

[This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For]

Philip M. Parker is a pain in the ass. He patented a method for automatically producing books from preset templates which are then populated with data from databases and the web.

GR currently list over 3700 unique books and Amazon supposedly lists over 85,000 books under his name! And they probably are all unique, given the nature of his auto-book production.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Is there a way to clean up the database and remove authors with zero books or does it happen automatically?

Merging them with the correct author takes care of it, but IIRC just leaving them be for a couple days does the trick too.

[Monissa]

Arthur Conon Doyle looks like he could use some tidying up by someone braver than me.
http://www.goodreads.com/author/list/...

[Monissa]

HG Wells could do with a hand, especially from someone who can translate German, French and/or Spanish without having to cut & paste. I combined two author profiles which created duplicates + the foreign titles + usual oddly typed things.

I think most of it is sorted out now, but after an hour or so on dial up (it's a long list), I'm sick of looking at La Guerra De Los Mundos

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...

[Paul]

Noam Chomsky needs attention from someone who knows if the plethora of slightly-different-titles are really different books.

[Raymond]

Why has 'Sir' been added in front of Arthur Conan Doyles' name? Is this a glitch, a mistake or is this a site rule?

One other question is the site rule for author names, First name, Last name or should this be the library standard, last name, first name format?

[rivka, Former Moderator]

The "Sir" has been removed, which is as it should be. Consensus when this came up recently was to omit all titles, except if needed for clarification.

Author names are always entered as First Last; in some parts of the site, they are automatically listed as Last, First. But that only works properly if they have been entered First Last to begin with.

[Veronica]

I cleaned up Howard Fast last week, but there are a few titles that appear to be in other languages. Could somebody check it out?

[Brandy]

The Michigan series is down to 250, 260, somewhere in there. I'm going cross-eyed looking at the same cover over and over, so I've hit the wall for today. Just about all of these have something we can call an author, even if it's an entity--New York State Supreme Court, Michigan Convention Committee, something like that. I don't think we'll have many left at all that don't have any identifying author, which is good news, I think.

Over a thousand down! Two hundred and fifty-something to go!

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Over a thousand down! Two hundred and fifty-something to go!

Y'all are AWESOME! :D

[This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For]

I just noticed that the author various has over 2200 books. While some of these may be legitimate, in many cases it looks like the authors should be known or there is an editor who should be credited.

[Lisa]

Michael, When I click on that link, most of the first several books do list authors' names. Those should be easy to fix.

Another list to pare down. Thanks for the info.

I've been remiss lately.

[This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For]

I know; I didn't say it would be impossible. But there are over 2200 of them...a little much to do by myself :)

Now, if I were Rivka...

[Lisa]

Michael, I agree it's daunting. Yes, Rivka is our # 1 librarian last I checked, in good part because of these multiple pseudo author lists. I've temporarily run out of steam; I'll try to get back to work soon.

[This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For]

Another similarly generic author is N/A with about 220 books. At a quick glance, some of these are clearly wrong (there is an obvious author or editor), while in other cases it should perhaps be merged to anonymous.

I was also amused to notice an author called Editor, particularly since they have a full bio clearly belonging to someone else (it is an exact copy of that of Rachel Kramer Bussel; not sure if someone did that on purpose or it was a weird database accident).

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Now, if I were Rivka...

You would have Peach (Passover) coming in less than two weeks and a housekeeper who didn't show up for two Sundays in a row and probably won't next week either? ;)

I've stuck those all on the "please work on" list, but the thing is that "Various" is often correct -- I've tagged a fair number with that myself. *shrug*

And I edited the "author" bio on Editor to blank. That was weird.

[Maria]

Tamora Pierce (and if that doesn't work, Tamora Pierce) could use some work as well. There are lots of German editions that haven't been combined. I've tried tackling the ones I could (with my limited knowledge of German I only took those I was certain of), but there are some where I really doubt we're talking about the same Tamora Pierce... some book on clinic pathonphysiology????

[This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For]

A general bit of advice in tackling editions in alternate languages for those of us who don't speak the language in question. For many authors, Wikipedia is a very good source for this. You can look up the author in English, then find the box on the left side of the screen listing the same page in other languages. In many cases, it will list the works in that language with the English title; it will also often indicate when a single English work was broken up into multiple smaller works.

I've had a lot of luck with this in figuring out German and Dutch editions of some authors, a little less with French, and virtually none with Spanish (although I understand a little Spanish, which helps).

For example, the German wikipedia page for Tamora Pierce is here.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

That's very clever!