Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I know this topic has come up before. However, I wanted to start a dedicated discussion.

Let me start by saying that the Librarian Notes feature is great and the vast majority of the time is used appropriately. It is a very helpful communication tool among librarians and most of the time the information given in the Notes is respected.

However, I have had multiple occurrences of librarian notes getting ignored. The notes were recently added as part of the "are you sure?" combine page and are STILL getting ignored.

I have recent example with I am Legend. If you look on the combine page for this book, you will see the various editions are riddled with notes (some mine and some from others). These notes were to indicate that "I am Legend and Other Stories" (also printed with the title as just "I am Legend") should not be combined with the original novel/novella. I had been working on separating these out about a week ago, after having noticed that the notes from previous librarians had been ignored. Within a few days (i.e., yesterday) they were combined again despite the notes.

In the meantime, I have started putting a note on every single edition that needs to be separated, just to make it easier to find them again, rather searching through a list of sometimes hundreds of editions. (See an example here.) I will also message the librarian responsible, if I can tell who it was. (Sometimes there are too many edits since I last checked to be able to easily discern the librarian responsible).



Is there anything else that can be done? Should anything else be done?

Looking at the current text in the Manual, the instructions on combining are pretty sparse. I had written up some text on adaptations that has yet to be added to the Manual (adaptations is one area where I re-separate often). Should we add something on short story collections etc. as well?

I apologize for my long-winded rant on this but redoing the same work is starting to get to me. If this was just an occasional thing, or there weren't any notes, I might not be so frustrated. However, it seems like every time I take on a "project" to separate out things like this, they are recombined within a matter of days (sometimes hours) despite my notes.

Were you able to see which librarian ignored the notes?

For the I am Legend editions, there are two librarians that made combines yesterday. I can't really tell which one ignored the notes, and which might have been legitimately combining something that went together. I wouldn't want to offend someone unnecessarily.

vicki_girl wrote: "For the I am Legend editions, there are two librarians that made combines yesterday. I can't really tell which one ignored the notes, and which might have been legitimately combining something tha..."


Gotcha. That is frustrating. It's not like notes are hard to see.

Have you ever added a librarian note along the lines of, "Combined by super-librarian. Do not touch or bad things will happen." Maybe with a link to a post, like this one? Telling them to post here for corrections rather than making changes themselves.

Shay wrote: "Have you ever added a librarian note along the lines of, "Combined by super-librarian. Do not touch or bad things will happen." Maybe with a link to a post, like this one? Telling them to post here..."

Is that effective?

Shay wrote: "Have you ever added a librarian note along the lines of, "Combined by super-librarian. Do not touch or bad things will happen." Maybe with a link to a post, like this one? Telling them to post here..."

I could put more detail in my notes, but I have no authority as far as bad things happening and would not add anything like that. However, they are already being ignored, so would that help? ~shrug~

And just to be clear the problem is well-meaning librarians combining things that should be separate, not the other way around.

I would really like to see the manual updated for adaptations. I would also like to get short stories, collections, and 'Generic Tale and Other Stories' types of works clarified. I think most of us treat story collections the same as "don't combine 2-in-1 books or boxed sets". However, that could be made clearer in the manual.

Thanks for you patience with me everybody. Reading my first post, I can get very rant-y when I am frustrated. > . <

I would think/hope that most people would assume that if a super did it, the action would somehow have more authority. I know that if I saw that had a librarian's note attached saying a super did something, I would be not really willing to touch it. Or, at least, I would go to the post and explain why I thought it should be changed without touching it myself. Just give it a try, maybe it will work. Also, and I know it's more of a feedback issue, maybe something worth discussing is supers having the ability to "freeze" certain books that are problematic. That way, like deleting books with more than 5 reviews, a change would have to go through a super.

I don't blame you for getting upset. I have had a few people change stuff I've fixed (and just page counts, nothing as complex as this issue) and it's infuriating because they are wrong. I know they were wrong, a super confirmed it.