Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Is it policy to merge all dictionary authors into Dictionary? If so, I'd like to reopen a discussion of this; it seems to me that it's more useful to use an editor such as we're discussing for magazine editors (for example, American Heritage) when named editors aren't available (such as E.S.C. Weiner for the OED). Often these editors represent reference collections which are more than just dictionaries. On a practical note, I think that most of the dictionaries are imported with editor names or house names (or easily understandable variants thereof -- I just merged a handful of "Editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries" into "American Heritage", for example).

I have put a couple of dictionaries under "Dictionary" since I saw that had been done in the past and was going for consistency and I like it well enough.

The question for me is, what do people look for when looking for a dictionary? I don't myself look for a brand name, e.g., Webster, American Heritage, etc. I look for "Dictionary" or "Spanish Dictionary", etc.

I don't know or care much about who edited it, published it, etc.

For things like Dictionaries (foreign or domestic) or maybe Thesarus or Encyclopedias, I like a descriptive author rather than an unknown author.

But, any other ideas would be great too and I'll go with the flow.

hmmmm - looking at the librarian edits on the "author" page Dictionary - I see that it was added by a "deleted member". I'll let rivka or some other Goodread's staff weigh-in on this.

I'm pretty sure we are not supposed to dump things under "Dictionary". I think that was started by a former librarian who tended to just do what they thought made sense without paying any attention to established policy. Rivka will probably remember the final decision, however.

Re msg 2 - dictionaries differ a lot, in important ways. This might be more true for folks who buy them than for the GR lists, but American Heritage is very different than OED which is very different than Webster's. Not to mention if it's a Dictionary of Folklore, perhaps, or The Scrabble Player's Dictionary, or a Collegiate abridgement.... I don't desire the responsibilities of a GR librarian, but I thank you advance for taking care with these books' listings.

This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For wrote: "I'm pretty sure we are not supposed to dump things under "Dictionary". I think that was started by a former librarian who tended to just do what they thought made sense without paying any attention..."

This is unfortunately accurate. Please leave them under their correct author; this is often a corporate author like Random House, but not always.

So should we alter the info in the "bio" for the entry, "Dictionary"?

Probably a good idea. That's where I got the idea to use it recently.

Done.