Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Recently I've been trying to clean up the collection of books for Alfred Hitchcock since I own most of them. One thing I am doing is adding his role as "Editor" since he was the "editor" for all the books (although whether or not he actually had a hand "editing" the stories I have no idea).

I have come across a listing where a librarian has added individual authors to the "author" role: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/96... It is clear that the book is a collection of stories, and I do not think it's fair to only list a few of the more well-known authors as having essentially "co-authored" the book.

And then you get books like this: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46... where each author is listed as a "contributer" to the collection. They are, but this is not standard practice for modern day short story compliations, such as The Best American Short Stories series.

I am assuming here that it is more appropriate to list the editor, and then, if known, list the stories that appear in the book RATHER than list them individually as contributors/co-authors.

Am I correct? Is there a standard way of doing this?

(Also, I really hate asking questions like these but I'd rather ask and have someone just echo me than meddle with something and then have to have someone go in and fix everything I did.)

Thank you!

Angie wrote: "I'd rather ask and have someone just echo me than meddle with something and then have to have someone go in and fix everything I did."

Thank you for asking!

It IS Goodreads policy to include authors of short stories in a collection. Adding the description "contributor" is preferred.

So compilation books should look like this: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46...

Correct?

Yup.

IIRC, one of MICHAEL's rainy-day projects is making the contributors all clump together in a clickable "contributors" or the like. Don't hold your breath as to when that might happen, though. ;)

Thank you!

Hahaha. I can imagine that remains pretty low on the to-do list. :P

I was the librarian who added the contributors to Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery (I've been doing that for short story collections, where I could). It's gratifying to know that I did it right! :-)

Yup! :) Now I'm going to have to add the authors as I read the collections. It also means that there are a TON of collections that need to have this done, including the Best American Non-Required Reading/Short Stories series...

Angie wrote: "Yup! :) Now I'm going to have to add the authors as I read the collections. It also means that there are a TON of collections that need to have this done, including the Best American Non-Required R..."

But isn't it nice afterward to look at a short story author's page and see all of the books in which they've been published? I always like that part. :)

I'm personally pretty indifferent, but then again, I tend to prefer complete author collections rather than "selected works of". At some point it just becomes unwieldy, I think, especially if the person is published widely. I'd prefer another way of listing the works the author is published in, but I understand and follow the rules. :)

That said, if I ever get a story published in an anthology, you better believe I am going to be sooo excited to have a GR author's page. :P

Hmmmm... RE: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32...

After listing the contributors for this book, it created a new author page for an author who apparently hasn't been published elsewhere (or GR doesn't have the book yet, etc.) I think this is good, yes? It makes me really nervous, knowing that when I add contributors, it creates author pages for those authors. That feels like too much power (for me) or something.

However, it has NOT added the book to one of the contributor's profiles: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...

Is this a glitch?

It's there now. This is a known caching issue (I think).

Next time click on the link for 'x distinct works', and that will usually reset it.

Angie wrote: "After listing the contributors for this book, it created a new author page for an author who apparently hasn't been published elsewhere (or GR doesn't have the book yet, etc.) I think this is good, yes?"

This is good, yes! :) Everyone has to start somewhere. (Although sometimes there are two different possible forms for an author's name -- middle initial versus middle name, for example -- and then you wind up with two profiles for one person. It's really easy to merge them together if you happen to catch that, though, so if you have a new author and you think that they should have more books listed, try searching on variations on the name.) A lot of short stories authors only get listed when some librarian starts listing their anthologies, though, so it's not that strange.