Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I've been dong a bunch of author bios of late and it just occurred to me that I'm not citing the information. We cite a link for author photos, but there's no box for citing author bio text - should I be citing that as well? I usually get it from the author's site, but if there isn't' one of those, I usually find it from a bookseller's or publisher's website that is selling the book; on rare occasion, I get it from an article. Just want to be doing things the right way! Thanks

Im no authority, but I would think as long as its in your own words and not c/p'd directly from a site, then we wouldnt have to. Lets see what other people say as well though...

I agree, it would be nice to have a place to cite the source, even if it was only visible on the edit page.

Of the author bios I've updated, I copied one bio from the author's official site and wrote another one myself. The one I copied was a "con bio" so I'm pretty sure it was written for other people to use.

I even attempted to write and ask one author if they had an official bio. Unfortunately, I didn't get any response.

I was wondering about this. Would citing Wikipedia be a good way to go or should we do much more research on the author before we post any information - by rewriting it (in our words)?

Adna wrote: "I was wondering about this. Would citing Wikipedia be a good way to go or should we do much more research on the author before we post any information - by rewriting it (in our words)? "

Wikipedia articles often have citations and links to other sources--including the author's website and maybe interviews with the author. So I always start with Wikipedia, if only because it's a time saver. I also find that Wikipedia can have pertinent details omitted on the author's site (such as birthday).

I work on the Rule of Inverse Reliability: the more famous a person is, the less reliable his or her Wikipedia biography will be. This my seem counter-intuitive, because famous authors have more sources of information about them than a newly-minted author with a single book, right? However, more sources often means more potential for contradictory information. Also, famous people's pages tend to attract more vandalism than less popular pages.

It's also a matter of choice. If you love writing author biographies and want to do more thorough research, then I'm not going to stop you. That's great: dig deeper! On the other hand, if you're just interested in filling empty bio spaces, Wikipedia and the author's site will suffice in most cases.

And if you're ever in doubt, you can always post a topic here asking for a second opinion.

Do we have a topic where we can post links to reliable sources of information about authors? I mean more general sites than an author's own official one. For example, the Victorian Web and its sister site the Postcolonial Web have oodles (yes, that's a scientific term) of biographical information, provided by academics from around the world, about authors from those respective periods.

Thank you.

I do always try to find out if the author has the official page, but since I am primarily working to add the profiles for some of the less known to the world European authors (most of them are long gone) they tend to have a few sources that give the same basic info.

Some people have c&p'd Wikipedia articles into author bios, which is a problem--it violates the policy under which Wikipedia publishes things in some way (I can't remember the details ATM). Rewording the info from the articles is fine, of course.

Also, generally GR doesn't need the extensive bios that Wikipedia or other sites dedicated to authors' lives will have, I don't think. Anything more than a couple of short paragraphs seems overkill to me (unless it's for a GR author, in which case it's doubling as a profile and has more reason to be chatty).

Cait wrote: "Anything more than a couple of short paragraphs seems overkill to me (unless it's for a GR author, in which case it's doubling as a profile and has more reason to be chatty)."

Generally agreed, unless I'm getting the bio from their site and/or they are a fairly famous and prolific author.