Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I don't want to mess things up.
I searched by ISBN 0307336565, got
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77...
which looks similar but not identical:
(1) Different cover
(2) Different title [Birds or North America : A Guide to Field Identification]
(3) Different publisher details (Golden Press)
Is it possible to find the origin of the exisiting entry, and how 'safe' is it to assume that the impress in the book in front of me contains the 'correct' information?

Bernd wrote: "Is it possible to find the origin of the exisiting entry?"

Yup! You can find the origin of the existing entry this way:

1. Go to the book's page and click edit.

2. Scroll down to the bottom of the edition fields, just above the work fields. There's a field for "source" which will link to the originating Amazon or B&N entry (if the record was created by import) or to the GR user who created it (if the record was created manually).

In this case, the book comes from Amazon.

3. Now scroll back up to the top of this edit page and click on the "Librarian change log" link in the third paragraph from the top. This will show you what changes have been made to the record since it was created.

In this case, a librarian has edited the description field (and moved it from edition-specific to book-default).

Bernd wrote: "how 'safe' is it to assume that the impress in the book in front of me contains the 'correct' information?"

If your personal copy of this book shows a different cover, but the cover displayed on GR seems to be valid for this book (that is, it's not obviously the cover of an entirely different book put in by mistake), that this is probably an alternate cover situation. You can find instructions in the librarian manual for adding alternate covers!

In general, you're pretty safe adding subtitles to a book that doesn't have a subtitle or replacing a large publishing house with a more specific imprint from within that publishing house. However, you shouldn't change a subtitle (unless the subtitle on the record is obviously wrong). It's pretty rare for a publisher to be flat-out wrong if all of the rest of the information is correct, but you'll often get imprint names within a publisher changing between printings if the publisher has reshuffled in that time period, so this can often be a cue that you've got a reprint edition with the same ISBN -- in which case, probably the best thing to do if you don't need to create an alternate cover edition is change the publisher to the larger house name so that it encompasses both printings. In a situation like this, though, you'll have two editions anyway to hold the different cover art, so you can put the specific imprint on each one.

And just in general: thank you very much for asking before changing something that you weren't sure about! :)

Cait wrote: "And just in general: thank you very much for asking before changing something that you weren't sure about! :)"

Amen!

It occurred to me that a scan of the impress page of a book could help in clearly identifying items. Should not be too hard to implement, similar to covers.

Actually, given that I am aware of no sites that currently host them (with the occasional exception of Google Books and/or sometimes as part of Amazon's Look Inside), it would be extremely difficult to implement.