Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

After reading the manual, I'm still a little fuzzy on part of the process. Or at least very cautious.

If someone has entered a book by hand and just done title and author, for example, and there are a small number of users/reviews attached, do you merge after combining?

Some bestsellers have dozens of 'editions' that have no ISBN, publisher, etc. And the books are very new so there's little risk of multiple editions, etc. Do you just leave them all or merge obvious things like designated paperbacks or hardcovers?

Thanks!

If a book has been entered by hand and there is an official version (ie one with an ISBN), it is proper to merge it after combining.

A fairly dumb question but I just want to be clear.

According to the guide, books can (and should) be deleted post-merge if they have fewer than 15 reviews.

Once I combine an edition and then click on it, it has all kinds of reviews. So then I just leave it alone. But then I feel bad about leaving the work for someone else.

Does the guideline mean that if the book has fewer than 15 reviews before merging (and either a matching ISBN or none at all), that it is then safe to delete it after merging?

Thanks again.

Not a dumb question at all. :)

Editions with legitimate (and unique) ISBNs should NOT be deleted post-merge, whether they have no reviews or hundreds.

If they lack an ISBN, or if someone has managed to enter one that is a duplicate (by using the 13-ISBN as a 10-ISBN, by adding extra characters, etc.), then the question is whether they have any other information that makes that edition unique -- a different cover, publisher, a publication date that is pre-ISBN (~1966), etc. If any of those are true, please do not delete.

If a book is not unique in any of those ways, it should be deleted (post-merge!). If it has fewer than 15 reviews, any librarian can do so. If more, please post in the "please delete this book" thread, and a super-librarian will take care of it.

If you're not sure if a given edition merits deletion, start a thread here and we'll all squabble-- er, discuss-- it. ;)

Rivka, Thank you so much for reminding people not to indiscriminatingly delete. I have many old, uniquie, pre-ISBN editions that I've manually added and I know that I'm not the only one. I really appreciate it.

You're definitely not the only one. :)

Thanks for the clarification!

I'm a cataloger 'in real life' so I'm pretty comfortable with distinguishing one edition from another. However, I'm still adjusting to the idea of deleting anything. In shared library catalogs, duplicate records get grumbled about but left alone.

But I've felt guilty combining really straight-foward things and then leaving the deleting for someone else.

I don't believe in unproductive guilt. ;) And since you can't really do anything else . . . Anyway, it's a cooperative effort! :)

You'll just have to get in line behind Melody. ;D

Hey now! Watch it.

O:)

Just because you're so good at finding books that need deletion. ;D

Each numbered volume is a different book, not a different edition -- these were published annually, with completely new content every year. All the ones with the same number seem to be combined (I took care of the single one that was not already).

That is supposed to happen. Multiple editions of a book get listed together, but they are visible are individual editions.

Ok, I think I got them all. I'm rather confused, though -- you seem to be the person who added all of them. If they were duplicates, I'm not clear on why. I also don't understand why you didn't delete them yourself. You have librarian status, and none of them had more than a couple reviews.

I didn't want to start a new topic for this, so I'll pop this question in here...

If an author joins goodreads and "takes over" their author profile, does it have any effect on work done on combining their books?

The reason I ask is that I'd combined editions for a certain author, then like a week or two later that author joined GR. A few days ago I popped back into combine editions for that author to check something and saw that every single edition of every book had been separated. I checked edit logs and there was no notation of them being manually separated. So the only thing I could think happened was that there was a change when the author joined.

Is this the case, or was it just some weird occurence? If so, that could really suck for an author with a lot of combining work done on them.

I'm moving this to the spot Otis checks. That would be an awfully weird bug.

I wonder if the author didn't understand how combining editions works here and un-combined them?

The author is Sharon Sala.

I combined various editions for her back around the end of March since none had been combined yet. Everything was as combined as it could be. Then the author joined last month, and sometime last week, as I said, I checked something, and everything was separated. So I went through and re-combined again.

If you check the logs for say, Dark Water
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19...

it shows that I combined 3/26, then again 6 days ago, but there's no notation of them being separated, yet they somehow where.

So I have no idea what happened. The only thing that had changed was the author joining.

Do separations show up on logs? I don't know. I've never seen one.

Aha! Apparently they do.

I think my guess was right. Looks like the author separated out all the editions. Might want to drop her a line. :)

(I'm taking down the Otis signal on this thread. ;) )

Yes, separations show up. I just went back because I knew I'd just had to do some before re-combining and they're there.

They do...I just separated and re-combined. It showed up in the logs.

Huh, interesting. Her separations don't show up on any of the other logs I checked. Weird.

Yeah, note edit(s) on my comment on the bottom of page 1.

Do the logs max out? I think they may after a page's worth of edits.

Ah, great minds think alike. ;-)

I don't know what author you're referring to, but I do remember a GR author some time ago who cared about readers buying her new editions and she wanted the new editions noticed as such, and she didn't like that the old editions showed up first. Which they did because they'd been out longer so more readers had read them. I can't remember who that was though. This could be another GR author.

I remember that one. It was a different author.

The logs for these books are short, most only have that I've combined them twice and that's it.

I've checked a whole bunch for the author and the only one to show a separation was the one you linked to, Rivka. Intersting thing about that book, though, is that it has no other editions period. So I'm not sure what it was separated from, unless I goofed somewhere on that one.

The logs are not always complete. I know that for sure. What I do not know is why I sometimes don't see things that I know have been done on them. I was guessing length, but maybe it's sunspots. Or magic! ;)

But I do think this was a case of an author separating (deliberately or otherwise) all of their book's editions.

Or it could be poltergeists. They can be rather mischievous ;)

Probably the author, it looks like. Which is better than some GR oddity. I just got a little worried that this happened whenever an author joined. I'd hate to think that some of combining work I've done would go bye-bye. That would suck. Matching foreign titles to english ones for combining is not fun and I'd hate to have to do it over.

Thanks for the help!

Or it could be poltergeists.

*whimper* But they promised!



Yeah, I'm glad it's not a weird bug. That really would suck!

Here's the problem I've run into a number of times. The book is not titled correctly, or for some reason doesn't show up as another edition that I can merge.

In the case of the book I'm looking at now, Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking, there are two entries, one with few enough reviews to merge and delete, but they won't merge. There are no other editions listed.

I tried entering the ISBN, so the database would pick up that they're the same book, but that's not allowed, since the ISBN is taken.

Please explain how to work this out. Thanks.

Ruby, the problem with the stray edition is that the author's name is spelled differently than the other editions (Sweeney vs. Sweeny). Change the author's name on that stray edition, then you can merge and delete it.

EDIT: also, on the main listing, the one with 3 editions, the 2nd one listed is a duplicate. It has the same ISBN 13 as the popular edition. So that one can be deleted as well.

How to merge a book into the "right" one?

When I deleted duplicate(s), usually the reviews went piled up to the most popular (i.e the most rated or reviewed) edition.

Now it makes me hesitated to delete the other duplicates, because it may upset the owner of the books due to edition changing (most of all: book covers).
I know I am upset when I found out that the books in my shelves suddenly changing edition without my consent :)

Is there something I should do -but missed- to perform correct merging?

Nenangs, when you have a duplicate and you know which edition it was meant to be, this is how to merge that duplicate with the actual edition:

1) Separate the duplicate and its actual edition from any other editions of that book.

2) Combine them just with each other.

3) Delete the duplicate. It will merge with its actual edition because this is the most popular (only!) other edition available in that combination.

4) Re-combine the actual edition with the other editions of the book.

(I don't find many duplicates where someone's gone to the trouble of uploading cover art but didn't find the actual edition, though! Have you run into many?)

Great directions, Cait. Maybe we can get them added to the Librarans Manual.

I don't think that's what Nenanags meant about covers. Rather, if someone actually read the third most popular edition, which has a different cover than the first most popular (to which they were inadvertently bumped when the edition they had selected, which showed no cover but was actually a duplicate of third-most-popular), they might not like it. Of course, they can always use the "switch to this edition" option, but I agree that it's better to avoid the problem in the first place.

Our goal should be to make things simpler for other GRers, not more complicated.

Thank you Cait,
I knew it should be that simple, and I guess I had it locked at the back of my mind but just couldn't figure out the combination key.:-)

Yes Rivka, that was what I meant.
Tell you the truth, we have lots of passionate GoodReaders. And some of us (me included I guess, hehe) are so picky about which edition we really read, while some others are not.
And so, when we search the edition we read, and didn't found it (and lately GR search engine seems to have some trouble finding books that actually already listed, a bug maybe?), we tend to add our own edition to GR list. And some of us are more resourceful than the others to be able to search or scan and upload the book covers, without knowing that we had created redundancies.
And then, when I found those doubles, if I absolutely certain about it, I merge them (if I can), or ask a superuser to merge them. That's when I realize the problem with the cover arts.

Thanks again, Cait & Rivka.
I too, think that Cait's direction should be included in the Libarians Manual.

Abigail, Well, I don't see any reviews as this book or any other editions of it. But if you successfully combined them, that's really strange. I've never heard of this happening. It shouldn't matter that the remaining edition didn't have any reviews.


Edit: An interesting note: I searched the title to see if another edition was there under a different author's spelling; I cannot find any edition. Guess that's just the funky search issue.

I have no idea what happened. There's no way this could have been predicted.

Edit: Abigail, Most likely you don't remember/didn't see the member with this book, but if you happened to notice, you can always message them.

Abigail, Well, the book editions combined so I'm not convinced that you did do anything wrong.

If nobody can figure out here what the likely scenario is, I do think you should post this in the Goodreads Feedback group in the bugs folder. Just in case it's repeatable and Goodreads can prevent it from happening again.

Edit: It's highly unlikely, but I wonder if the member in question has just deleted the book from their shelves???

Abigail, Was there a review or just a rating, do you know? If just a rating maybe it is some sort of unusual caching issue.

Abigail, I know how you feel but it doesn't seem as though there was any way to predict this problem. (I keep my reviews in a Wod document too. I know there can be glitches. Unfortunately, I have so many books I might never notice a missing book. Hopefully those 2 members will catch this and put the book back on their shelves)

My first attempt at being a librarian and I think I screwed something up!

As a reader I was trying to find/add the edition of the book The Family of Adoption by Joyce Maguire Pavao http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/.... When I read the book I added my wordy review but didn't realise it was on the wrong edition (one with an empty ISBN but the correct published year). Last week I attempted to add the book manually, but seem to have added two different editions (whose details I have not confirmed as correct - they were uploaded via Amazon). When I went to check, I saw that the edition I reviewed was incorrect but already merged. I went in and deleted the incorrect edition, and the pop-up said it would merge all the reviews (luckily only 1, mine) into the most popular edition. But now the review is gone, and of course i haven't saved it anywhere outside of GR. Is there any way to get it back?

Also: 1. What did I do wrong? 2. Should all the editions of The Family of Adoption be merged, even though the newest one says it is 'revised?

Thanks...
ps. Also, while the other edition shows up in my 'read' list, with the correct star review, i've lost all the other data, including my other shelves it was on, date read, and private notes.

Merged and combined are NOT the same, at least not the way the librarian manual uses the words. (Looking back at this thread and others, I see we have often used the two interchangeably.)

Combining is done with all editions of a book (including revised ones), which I just did with The Family of Adoption. If you then delete an edition (which should ONLY be done if it is a duplicate, most often with an invalid ISBN or none at all (although some books without ISBNs are valid)), it will merge with the most popular edition it is currently combined with.

If it is not combined with any other editions, all reviews will be lost. We try to avoid that. ;) It sounds like that what you might have accidentally done.

And don't worry. Even experienced librarians make mistakes. :)

Try using the "contact us" link down at the bottom of the page. It may be possible for Otis & crew to recover your lost review.

Thanks for your reply Rivka. I will need to study the manual and re-read this thread closely, and take things a little more slowly next time :)

I've sent a message so fingers crossed my review can be found.

I hope they can find it. :) And welcome, btw!