how do you "read" the librarian change logs?

[willaful]

I find the change logs very hard to follow -- when I look up a change I made, I usually see at least 3 items, only one of which is remotely connected to what I actually did. Can someone diagram them or parse them or decode them for me?

[Cait]

Here's an annotation from your most recent set of changes. I hope this will help!

willaful updated the work by Maya Banks
This entry lists a change to "the work", that is, to the entire book rather than a specific edition of it: this means that changes were made to the "work settings" fields at the bottom of the edit page, the ones which apply to all editions at once, or to the default description. Even if you make edition changes and work changes in the same edit, they show up in the log as an edition change and a separate work change! This is why you see so many change log entries when you think you only did one edit. Sadly, the work in question is not indicated in the log; we have to figure it out from the rest of the entries. Also, the author is a hyperlink, so we can jump directly to the author if we want to. There's also no cover shown: again, that's because this is work on a whole book instead of a single edition.

default_description:
In this case, it was the default description which changed. Default descriptions are attached to books, not editions, not even the editions whose edit page was used to enter the text of the description with the "default" checkbox checked.

'Mistress. It sounded so sordid, so impersonal, so far removed from the kind of relationship Marley Jameson had with Greek hotel magnate Chrysander Anetakis. What she thought she had. Until he abruptly broke things off between them and told her to leave his luxurious apartment.Three months later, Marley awakens in the hospital, with no memory of what happened before she got there. She can't remember her past, Chrysander…or the baby she carries. All she knows is that when Chrysander sweeps her away to his private Greek island, being with him feels like home. Even though he never speaks of love, surely his protectiveness and his desire for her prove how much she means to him. Until she remembers the truth….'
to
'Two books in one. Mistress by Maya Banks. (aka The Tycoon's Pregnant Msitress. It sounded so sordid, so impersonal, so far removed from the kind of relationship Marley Jameson had with Greek hotel magnate Chrysander Anetakis. What she thought she had. Until he abruptly broke things off between them and told her to leave his luxurious apartment. Three months later, Marley awakens in the hospital, with no memory of what happened before she got there. She can't remember her past, Chrysander… or the baby she carries. All she knows is that when Chrysander sweeps her away to his private Greek island, being with him feels like home. Even though he never speaks of love, surely his protectiveness and his desire for her prove how much she means to him. Until she remembers the truth…. Wanted: Mistress and Mother by Carol Marinelli. When ruthless Italian barrister Dante Costello hires Matilda Hamilton, he sees an opportunity. Matilda's job is to create a magical garden, in the hope it will help Dante's troubled little girl. However, since attraction between them is hot and intense, why not take Matilda as his mistress, as well? Dante has always kept his emotions firmly under wraps when it comes to relationships. But this time will he succeed when his desire for Matilda is pushing him to the edge of control?'
I've added linebreaks here to make the change clearer: what's listed is first the old text, the transition word "to", and then the new text. There's no (undo) after this, because changes to the default description can't be directly undone.

18 hours, 11 min ago (#39174542)
This is the relative timestamp on the change plus the id of the change itself. Don't worry about the id of the change itself; it has technical uses, but we don't need it on this side of computer unless we're using the "undo" feature on the change logs.

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willaful updated the book The Mistress: The Mistress\Wanted: Mistress and Mother by Maya Banks
In this case there's a title, so this was work done directly on an edition record. The title is a hyperlink to the edition and the author to the author, so we know exactly what record is at stake here. Note: although it doesn't affect this instance, while I'm going though talking about this I might as well note that the title shown is always the current title of the edition in question, so if you're following a changelog back though time, the title here will always be the same for all work on this edition even if some of that work was a change to the title field. There's also a cover shown, which is again always the current cover for the edition even if it was changed. The cover also links to the edition.

image_uploaded_at: '' to 'Fri Aug 10 13:09:04 -0700 2012'
This is a book cover upload. The initial value of '', or two quotes around nothing, shows that this is a change from having no book cover to having some book cover. The second value is a single timestamp (the -0700 is a time zone indication) which is used to identify the cover image. Again, note that the cover image shown next to this change will not necessarily be the image which was uploaded if it was changed again later: the cover image shown in thumbnail is the current cover and not part of the historical log.

(undo)
You can actually undo cover image changes now. In this case, all it would do is remove the cover just uploaded, since the initial state for this change is '', or no cover.

18 hours, 15 min ago (#39174463)
Relative timestamp and id again.

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willaful updated the work by Maya Banks
Another change to the whole book, not the edition.

original_title: '' to ''
Not much of a change, nothing to nothing! This often shows up as a floating change when you edit some of the work settings fields (in this case, the media type -- see next comment). Don't worry about it; it's probably just a side effect of the validation on these fields and not worth some developer's trouble to suppress in the logs. As you can see, there's no actual change made.

media_type: '' to 'book'
This change happens by default a lot if you change something on a previously unedited book. The assumption is that records worth editing are definitely books, I guess. (The media type field is a dropdown in the work settings that isn't ever used on purpose anymore: it has "book", the default, "not a book", which has been superseded by the new not-a-book process, and "article" and "periodical", two types for which we have no policies. If the update from nothing to the default "book" didn't keep showing up in the change logs, I wouldn't even remember the field was there.)

default_description:
'Mistress. It sounded so sordid, so impersonal, so far removed from the kind of relationship Marley Jameson had with Greek hotel magnate Chrysander Anetakis. What she thought she had. Until he abruptly broke things off between them and told her to leave his luxurious apartment.Three months later, Marley awakens in the hospital, with no memory of what happened before she got there. She can't remember her past, Chrysander…or the baby she carries. All she knows is that when Chrysander sweeps her away to his private Greek island, being with him feels like home. Even though he never speaks of love, surely his protectiveness and his desire for her prove how much she means to him. Until she remembers the truth….'
to
'Mistress. It sounded so sordid, so impersonal, so far removed from the kind of relationship Marley Jameson had with Greek hotel magnate Chrysander Anetakis. What she thought she had. Until he abruptly broke things off between them and told her to leave his luxurious apartment.Three months later, Marley awakens in the hospital, with no memory of what happened before she got there. She can't remember her past, Chrysander…or the baby she carries. All she knows is that when Chrysander sweeps her away to his private Greek island, being with him feels like home. Even though he never speaks of love, surely his protectiveness and his desire for her prove how much she means to him. Until she remembers the truth….'
Another change to the default description. Was this a typo fix? I can't actually spot the difference here.

18 hours, 16 min ago (#39174406)
And finally, the relative timestamp and id.

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willaful updated the book The Mistress: The Mistress\Wanted: Mistress and Mother by Maya Banks
Another change to the specific edition record. Or, since I'm reading this backwards in time, I guess I should say "a previous change".

description:
'Mistress. It sounded so sordid, so impersonal, so far removed from the kind of relationship Marley Jameson had with Greek hotel magnate Chrysander Anetakis. What she thought she had. Until he abruptly broke things off between them and told her to leave his luxurious apartment.Three months later, Marley awakens in the hospital, with no memory of what happened before she got there. She can't remember her past, Chrysander…or the baby she carries. All she knows is that when Chrysander sweeps her away to his private Greek island, being with him feels like home. Even though he never speaks of love, surely his protectiveness and his desire for her prove how much she means to him. Until she remembers the truth….'
to
''
This looks, at first glance, like you deleted the description since it's taking it from something to nothing. In this case, though, I think that's not what happened: what it's actually doing is taking it from some edition-specific text to a display of the default description. There's no real indication for "set edition to use default description" in the change log, but when you do it, it always looks like this, and it looks the same whether you overrode the description by clicking the "use default description" link to set it to the existing default or you chose to use this description as the new default by checking the "set this as the default description" checkbox. In fact, it might look like this if what happened was that you separated this edition into a new work all on its own and therefore the internal process promoted this from an edition description to the default description.

(undo)
Undo here would change this edition from using the default description to holding an edition-specific description (even if that matched the default). If this change involved updating the default description, undoing this change will not actually change the default; only the edition's part of the change will revert.

image_uploaded_at: 'Tue Aug 07 21:28:57 -0700 2012' to ''
This is another book cover change. In this case, it's going from a timestamp to a nothing: this indicates that you removed the cover for this edition.

(undo)
An undo of this would actually restore the deleted cover! This is because the image itself has not been deleted; it's just been removed from its association with the edition in question. I'm not sure if there's a time limit on undoing this or if the covers are just stored forever.

18 hours, 17 min ago (#39174398)
And a relative timestamp and id to close the entry again.

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willaful separated:
The Mistress: The Mistress\Wanted: Mistress and Mother
Change entries for separation show you the smaller of the separated works (there's a hyperlink on the title to the edition in question). I think it still does this even if you use the separate tool and separate multiple editions at once, but I can't find a relevant change log to check up on that right now.

18 hours, 18 min ago (#39174371)
Timestamp, id, you know the drill.

[Vicky]

I'd love to help you out, but I'm not entirely sure what you're asking. The logs have always seemed fairly straight forward to me and I'm not sure what you mean by items that aren't connected to the change you made.

Do you have an example that you find confusing? That might be an easier place to start.

[willaful]

Thank you for that very thorough explanation, Cait -- I see the differences between changing the entire work and changing a specific edition are what cause a lot of the confusion. Plus the vestigal weirdnesses.

[❂ Murder by Death]

Thanks for that Cait - it was really helpful.