Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I have come across this repeatedly when looking at books. The author writes a novel lets say for convenience Oathblood by Mercedes Lackey. The original title of the work is Oathblood. However someone has added that its part of a series to the original title. That original title never changes so should still be Oathblood. Only the listing of the book should change. Is that correct.

Secondly, when do you list an illustrator separately. Again with this book, the person who did the cover art is listed as the "Illustrator". When I think of Illustrator's I think of people who illustrate the whole book not just the cover. To me the cover artist should not be listed ever as the Illustrator

1. That's an interesting question. I went to include the series info, for now, since the Original Title is not actually used anywhere, it's really more librarian info at this point. If better series support is ever implemented, the question will become moot.

2. Cover artists should not be listed at all (some are, either through import or librarian error). There was a long discussion about this and the official (i.e., Otis) decision was to not list cover artists.

Illustrators in the contents can occasionally be tricky in my opinion. Truly illustrated works are one thing, but I often wonder if minor doodling at the beginning of each chapter should really qualify. I've never deleted (or added) an illustrator with respect to this, but I do occasionally wonder if there is a threshold which should be passed for inclusion.

The Original Title field was mainly implemented to help with distinguishing the original title of translated editions, and for books that had been published under different titles (in the original language).

I add series information to the original title field partially to help when correcting the titles of multiple editions. I can copy and paste from the Original Title field up to the title field and keep them all constant. I don't think it detracts from the intended usage of the field to add series info, but of course, I'm open to others' thoughts on the matter. = )

Generally, the illustrator is only listed for someone illustrating the content of the book, not just the cover. You are correct that the cover artist should not be listed as Illustrator (unless it is a book about said illustrator, who would of course have also done the cover.)

You might be seeing that situation because there were a couple of Librarians who had added the cover artist as Illustrator (and sometimes changed the cover in GR to an original print of the artwork, rather than the actual cover with title, etc.) This occurred before we had a discussion here in the Librarian's group on the topic and it was decided that cover artists would not be listed as Illustrator (Otis weighed in on that one too.) I think that corrections were just not made to all of the ones changed over - I tend to correct them as I find them (there are many in the SF&F genre, for example.)

I've also noticed a lot of data coming in from B&N to have Mr./Miss/Mrs. in front of author names, and which has added industry roles like book editor, book designer, etc. to a book already credited to an author (and matching the title). Feel free to correct any of the above in a book's description.

I would just not list series info in the "original title" unless the cover said it was part of a series.

I figured cover artists were not illustrators.

Jeffrey wrote: "I would just not list series info in the "original title" unless the cover said it was part of a series."

Not only do I disagree (for many of the same reasons Michael and Carolyn mentioned), there's a practical issue. The data in probably 90+% of the Original Title fields out there has not been entered by hand; the system put it there after the most recent time multiple editions were combined into a work (going by earliest publication date of the combined editions). And even if someone were to edit it, the next time an earlier edition were combined with that work, the field would be overridden.