Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Is there a way to separate characters from different books/series with the same name? It's a bit misleading to include all the books a character is in on the character page when some of the books are about a different character with the same name.
(example: Isabelle Lightwood - http://www.goodreads.com/characters/1...)
Wow I just realized how confusing that question is.

You can't disambiguate characters like you can authors.

When you put the character name in, don't click on the name when it comes up in the drop down menu. It will therefore create a new character which is what you want.

All right, thanks.

The librarian manual says:

In some cases, a character will have only one name, like "Angel," or a very common name, like "John Smith." Make every attempt to distinguish the character with a unique name; the character's common name can be placed in the "Alias" field. If this is not possible, then add a short version of the book or series title in parentheses to distinguish between characters with the same name.

When adding a new character, check the list of characters to make sure that a character with that name is not already in the database. If no character with that name already exists, simply add the character. If a character with that name DOES exist, add the character with the series name in parentheses. If a character appears in more than one series by the same author, use the name of the first published series to contain the character.