Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I have run across many books with multiple ghost editions. The manual states that one merges two editions, so that reviews and ratings move to the correct edition.
https://help.goodreads.com/s/article/...

It in't practical to seperate two editions, delete, combine and then repeat for each edition to be deleted. II was wondering if I could do a mass delete, seperating the good edition and all the duplicates and combining it into one work and then delete all the duplicates. I searhed for the answer here:
https://www.goodreads.com/group/comme...
The answers seemed to imply that I could do just that. But since the posts are all several years old, I wsn't sure if the system would still work that way.

If the edition you want to merge into is the default edition you don't need to separate. But keep in mind, you want to merge the same format. Because you have not provided an example, it isn't possible to give you a definitive answer.

Purely technical speaking, you can separate the target edition and multiple duplicates at once. Or if you discover an other duplicate before you have recombined the target and the main work, you can just separate the duplicate from the main work and combine it with the target edition.

Thank you.

That is exactly what I meant. I recently went to shelve a vintage book with several duplicates that had been imported from the third party seller. mine was the only shelving at all so the rest were duplicates. It was a pain to combine the default with a duplicate and then delete one at a time. that was what I was asking. Can I seperate a target and several duplicates in a group and then delete all the duplicates in a batch instead of just combining the target with 1 dupicate over and over.

Julie wrote: "I recently went to shelve a vintage book with several duplicates that had been imported from the third party seller. mine was the only shelving at all so the rest were duplicaes."

If the duplicate editions have no adds, then you can just delete them and not worry about which edition is receiving the non-activity.

Elizabeth, thank you. I thought that I might be able to do that but I wanted to be sure. In the case with no additions whatso ever that will be easiest. I wanted to confirm that it was ok first. However, if I have several duplicates with less than 5 shelvings, and one with several shelvings, can I make a big group? Then as I delete a record data will transfer to the record that has the most shelvings. that way I would only have to seperate and combine once. Do I have that right?

When you delete an edition, all of the shelvings and reviews are transferred to the target edition.

If all of the duplicates should go to the same edition, then, yes, you can separate all of them to be in the same Work. You will still have to delete them one at a time. Sometimes deletes don't go through. It would still be best to delete one and wait for it to through before doing others with the same target edition. You can know when the delete went through by looking at the librarian log for the target work.

When the delete has gone through, you will see something like this:

edition: Deleted edition id=166362774 title=The moon and sixpence (Chinese version) primary author=Maugham asin=B0791B28RM, deleted 0 reviews, deleted work=176399388

You cannot delete any edition that has more than 5 shelvings. That must be done by a Super. They appreciate your separating the duplicate and its target and also giving them a link to the work with which the target should be recombined.

Thanks for all the step by step instructions.

Julie wrote: "Thanks for all the step by step instructions."

+1

This information is extremely helpful for knowing when a "simple" librarian can delete an edition, and how best do this. Thank you, Elizabeth and Renske!