Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Just an fyi that the combine editions page will now be paginated into pages of 500. This will therefore not affect most authors, but will affect larger authors. Some authors simple had too many editions and the page was too slow and causing performance issues. Let us know if this causes any problems for anyone.

Otis, how will this work to combine editions which are on different pages?

You'll probably have to do a search.

Hmm. That could cause problems in some cases: if a book is translated into a nonromanized language, that title will always sort to the very end of the combine page, which would make it difficult to combine it with a romanized title from the beginning of the alphabet since there's no common filter string.

Edited to add: I suppose a workaround would be to edit the title of the nonromanized book to include the romanized title, filter on that, combine the editions, and then edit the title back. Extra work, but probably not required very often, so I'd call that acceptable. (We can add it to the librarian's manual!)

That's a good notion for a workaround, Cait.

And yeah, some of the more prolific authors have combine pages that take aeons to load; this sounds like a very reasonable way to avoid that problem. Thanks for the heads-up, Otis!

Is that 500 books or 500 editions? What will happen if a search turns up more than 500? Some popular older authors have single books with hundreds of editions; if the limit is individual books (and not individual editions) it may be impossible to combine because even the filter might fail to get everything onto a single page.

500 works. The search results are not yet paginated - hoping to not have to just yet.

Would it be possible to carry selected books over to another page? That is, say you select two books to combine on the first page and then go to the second page. Those two books will appear (maybe in a different coloured box) at the top of the second page, still checked. Then you could continue checking books on the second page that you'd like to combine with these previously selected books.

Ben wrote: "Would it be possible to carry selected books over to another page? That is, say you select two books to combine on the first page and then go to the second page. Those two books will appear (mayb..."

I would definitely be in favour of an adjustment like that, as it's impossible to combine books that are at different pages and, in case of foreign-language translations, search doesn't help either. I've just encountered this problem today, when adding some Isaac Asimov's books' translation editions and I would be seriously grateful if something could be done about it.

This is where Cait's suggestion of adding the English title in temporarily helps. I had to do that with some of Agatha Christie's books the other day. I just added the English title, searched for it, and once I was through combining, I erased the appended English title. It's a pain, but it shouldn't happen often and it works.

Ah, that's true. I guess I was temporarily out of my mind, because when I read her post, I didn't realize that method would work for romanized languages too at all. Anyway, many thanks for the suggestion. *goes to get herself some caffeine to restart her brain again*

anonymous is definitely a problem. Each page is alphabitized individually.

What about a "show all" option?

This way, the 500 limit is there and for most cases works really well, but if you want to join across pages you need to use the work around of adding common text, searching, combining, deleting the added common text.

When I shop, there is often a drop down at the bottom of the page to ask how many items per page I want to view. Perhaps somewhere on the combine page, there could be an option to "show all".

(Does this go here or in the Feedback group?)

Show all would defeat the purpose of having the pagination. The issue is that on larger books there is so much data that to load it all takes too much time, and overwhelms our database, not to mention locks up a webserver connection for far too long. So in short, we don't want to allow you to view them all if there are more than 500 - it kills the site.

Otis wrote: "Show all would defeat the purpose of having the pagination. The issue is that on larger books there is so much data that to load it all takes too much time, and overwhelms our database, not to men..."

I know, I just thought that may be it could be there just as an option. (In case of emergencies!)

Overall,the split combine page works really well - it absolutely speeds things up, it's just that the join across pages is a little clunky ...
Thanks.

Does the search need to be better? We can work on improving that if it would help...

At the very least all the listings should be alphabetized. Right now each page has symbols though z listings.

I'd love a more Boolean search algorithm. (Think of searching in PubMed)

Then I could search for "Temps" or "Time" so I could combine a French and English version of the same work (as an example). or even traditional wildcards (* %) from DOS (see how old I am!).

Is this clear, or should I keep writing ....

yes definitely add Boolean search capabilities.

I love Boolean operators. These would be a great search option to have. I know that Booleans aren't intuitive. They require instruction in order to be used properly, but they also can improve the GR search experience.

Shomeret

Could somebody please post a link to information about a "Boolean" search? I looked up the word but there's so many different meanings. Thanks!

Here's a *very* basic one: http://websearch.about.com/od/interne...

I'm working on a solution, but it requires a re-index of our search server and it's being finicky - stay tuned.

I found this really clear instructional video about Boolean operators on YouTube. It's at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vube-Z...

Shomeret

Thanks very much, Otis and Shomeret. I'll check out those links.

Otis wrote: "I'm working on a solution"

ooh, yay!

Oh, ok. I do these types of searches all the time. I just didn't know the term. Thanks.

Lisa wrote: "Could somebody please post a link to information about a "Boolean" search? I looked up the word but there's so many different meanings. Thanks!"

Boolean Search.

Many catalogs are post boolean because boolean can be very limiting as they are determined by indexing and that could in term is determined by language use( which may or may not be standardized).

Thanks, Keishua. Re computers, it seems much quickly becomes obsolete.