Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

So I'm working on attributing our book data to the appropriate librarians (to make sure what we have from other sources isn't marked as from Amazon)...I ran a little script to run through our librarian logs and reapply the changes to books (in case other data have been updated by other data sources).

Unfortunately, our librarian logs aren't as complete as I had assumed they were, so a lot of changes were reapplied for which the later fix was not reapplied afterwards. (For example, change A was made, then change B fixed it, but for whatever reason change A was the only entry in the librarian log...so I only made change A again). The end result: a few books had some of their data changed to less-than-correct values.

So if you could look through books 1-100 and see if there were recent edits that don't look correct, please double-check the edit and reverse it if necessary.

The books affected are book ids 1-100 and happened about 1.5 hours ago, starting with librarian edit # 11382477

A note before we go blaming librarians for bad edits: the librarians' names that are associated with these edits are the librarians who originally made the edits...they didn't go back just now and edit. So, basically, it's all my fault and you should blame me as you have to fix these 100 books.

I'm going to revise the script to ONLY change the librarian's name on the fields if the current book's value matches the value the librarian changed it to. So this won't happen again.

I really appreciate your help here!

Humbly,
Brian

Brian wrote: "So I'm working on attributing our book data to the appropriate librarians (to make sure what we have from other sources isn't marked as from Amazon)...I ran a little script to run through our libra..."

How do we locate books 1-100?

I assume like this:


http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2

...etc., changing the number on the end as you go.

Oops, yeah, thanks @vicki_girl! :)

Is this script the reason that my librarian change log is filling up with new copies of old changes that I made, now looking empty?

Eg:
Cait updated the book The Glasswrights' Test (Glasswright, #4) by Mindy Klasky
url: '' to '' (undo)
language_code: '' to '' (undo)
author_role: '' to '' (undo)
10 hours, 43 min ago (#11387486)

Cait updated the book The Glasswrights' Test (Glasswright, #4) by Mindy Klasky
title: 'The Glasswrights' Test' to 'The Glasswrights' Test (Glasswright, #4)' (undo)
Jun 06, 2009 07:30pm (#1817611)

Cait, almost certainly.

Cait wrote: "Is this script the reason that my librarian change log is filling up with new copies of old changes that I made, now looking empty?

Eg:
Cait updated the book The Glasswrights' Test (Glasswright, #..."

yes, i'm sorry about that. it shouldn't be changing any values (other than the first 100 as mentioned above), so hopefully it's not too bothersome.

I just checked 1-25, they're good now.

Thanks SO much, Vicky!

Anyone want to pick up 26-50? :)

Vicky wrote: "I just checked 1-25, they're good now."

by the way, how many of them did you have to correct? i'm hoping not many of them...?

About half I'd say, I wasn't really counting. :P

There was only one that reverted to a funny title, the rest of the changes were either adding ISBN13s or languages back in. Nothing too severe! :)

Vicky wrote: "About half I'd say, I wasn't really counting. :P

There was only one that reverted to a funny title, the rest of the changes were either adding ISBN13s or languages back in. Nothing too severe! :)"

That is a bit of a relief, I truly appreciate. I'll try to take a look at a few this weekend, but I'm a little less efficient and experienced at librarianifying books. :)

I've cleaned up/verified 26-50. There were fewer changes/errors made there. I only had to correct about 5 of them. It only took me about 20 minutes to do.

I'll take 51-75 sometime this weekend, so if someone else can do 76-100, we'll be all set! :)

(I've got some more data salvaging code to write this weekend...fun)

Okay, I've gone through the rest of them, so all 1-100 should be back to normal! :)

Also: the script has finished running, so we've attributed the data fields to the librarians who updated them.

HOWEVER, there are a few books whose librarian edits did not get processed. These are books that had librarian log entries with id 500,000 to 1,810,779. I'll try to fix that today, so if you see a book that does not look like the data are attributed to the right librarian (esp. if it's still pointing to amazon), check to see if the updates to the book (ignore combines, just data field changes) in the librarian log are in that range. If so, please just be patient.

Thanks for all the help, Vicky! :)

All of the librarian log processing scripts are done, so librarian edits should be attributed to the right person now. phew! :)