Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I want to merge books and I'm having trouble doing it. The instructions on the librarian guide may work for most, but the nuts and bolts of how to do it aren't obvious for a person as thick-skulled as me. As I understand it, the guide says to edit the book to be merged so that it has the same title and ISBN. If I do that then I can't save the changes because the ISBN is the same. If I change the title, then I'm given the option to use the other version of the book. I never see any prompts that say that it's time to actually merge editions. Can I get some more detailed info on how to do this?

Thanks

Can you give an example of which two books you are trying to merge? If they actually have different ISBNs, they should be combined, NOT merged.

Well, I just tried to get links for the books to send you, but it looks like, since yesterday, the questionable book has been removed.

The situation was that there was good entry for a book, and an entry for the same book that appears to have been made by someone who couldn't find the original good entry, so they added the book de novo. The bad entry had a personal review of the book rather than a book description and no book info (ISBN, etc). I wanted to merge the two entries, since I assumed they would have had the same ISBN, but when I went to the edit book screen, I found no clear option for merging the books. All I could understand from the instructions on how to merge books is that I needed to change the title and ISBN to match the good entry. I did that, but it wouldn't let me save the changes due to the matching ISBN. Changing the title to match the other book gave me the option to use the other book. I did this hoping that it would merge the books, but after doing so, I found that the bad entry still existed. Since the bad entry was gone today, is it possible that the merge just took a few minutes and that that was why I didn't see it happen immediately?

Basically, I'm new and clueless. I want to do a good job as a librarian, but I don't really know how to actually do the stuff I want to do. I pretty sure I understand when to combine or merge books, but what I don't really understand is how to do it. Any elightenment you can give me will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Ellis

Yeah, that happens sometimes. That's actually a sticky situation; if you just delete the incorrect book, the review disappears. Getting the reviewer to fix it or asking for help from Otis/Elizabeth/Jessica is probably your best bet.

If a book has been mistakenly added that already exists and it does not have the review in the book description slot, the way to merge is as follows: combine it with the correct edition (and ONLY that edition), and then delete the incorrect one. All reviews and ratings will be shifted to the correct one. If 10 or more ratings/reviews are already on the incorrect one, you'll need to ask for help from Otis/Elizabeth/Jessica -- only they can delete books like that.

Thanks, Rivka.