Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Every once in a rare while one encounters a particularly problematic book where edition differences may be subtle such that librarians keep undoing each others changes - not because there is a difference of opinion on what is correct, but rather because one needs greater knowledge of the details than is normally required to combine/separate/edit a book. It might be worth adding an option for locking a book so it cannot be edited (including combining editions) unless a superuser/librarian specifically unlocks it. This would hopefully be used only in rare cases, but would prevent certain edits from reoccurring over and over again.

Part of the point would not be that edits require a superuser/librarian, but also that even they would have to specifically unlock it before changes could be made (once unlocked, any librarian could edit it until and unless it is locked again).

Normal librarians could request a book be unlocked (or could specify the changes they wanted made, just as the request that editions on 10+ shelves be deleted now) or could request that a specific book be locked if they thought there was an ongoing problem with it.

Also, if this were implemented, a note field explaining why the book was locked might be useful as well so that any librarian other than the one who actually locked the book would have an idea as to why it was locked.

Obviously I'm thinking of a specific case here (the details aren't immediately important) but I've seen other similar problems on rare occasion and thought it might be a useful feature.

I'm one of the culprits in combining editions of books Michael is specifying. I will now remember this particular author (I hope) but there would have been no easy way to know not to combine editions of a book with identical titles.

So, I think that Michael has an excellent idea.

Books would have to be unlocked so that new editions could be combined, but those could be done by a librarian familiar with those particular books.