Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I started to add an author in a discussion topic using the add book/author link and I noticed that there are still a number of authors whose first names are listed as Jr. (ditto for Sr. and Jr, and Sr, as well)

If some librarian were advised about this and wanted to spend some time cleaning them up, it would help. Most seem to simply be the result of a bad data feed.

Hi Stephen,

I would love to help with this.

*edit*
I did not know we are changing this.

Changing what? Stephen is (I think) talking about author names that were incorrectly added as "Jr. John Smith" instead of "John Smith Jr."

rivka wrote: "Changing what? Stephen is (I think) talking about author names that were incorrectly added as "Jr. John Smith" instead of "John Smith Jr.""

Yes, that's what I meant. There seems to have been a number of these typo style errors that were imported back when the Amazon feed was dropped and I've been cleaning up some as I encounter them but quite a few still remain.

In a similar vein, there are still scores of authors listed both with their honorifics and without (e.g. General Leslie R. Groves - Ditto for Dr., Captain, Sir etc) Having them listed both ways means that the various versions of the books that they have written are often not combined.

Finally, there are many many authors listed with middle initials without the following periods (e.g. type alan j in the add book/author pop-up and more than a score of entries will appear) Many of these also have entries punctuated properly as well. I'm using alan j in this example but almost any common English given name paired with a single letter of the alphabet and a space will yield a few offenders.

Again, having them listed both ways means that the various versions of the books that they have written are often not combined.

It would be great if a librarian or two looking to help out could sort out some of these.

I'm NOT looking to just pass out assignments. I've been concentrating on cleaning up the "double and triple names being treated as one name" error but I haven't found a great way to get a list of those except by inspection. (Typing in a common English first name followed by " and" and then inspecting the results) These are often problematic in that one or more of the authors listed in the double barreled names also has other books under just their own name.

I've been fixing some of the Jr's that Stephen mentioned and I noticed that these Goodreads Authors do not have a dot after their Jr and are obviously immune to mere supers. Is there an appropriate thread for these edits like the merging thread?

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...

I would just start a new thread called Goodreads Authors Name Corrections, specifically for this (since it will not likely be used much for anything else). rivka will see it and take care of it.

We have normally just added them to the GR Author merge thread for rivka - with a comment indicating the fix required rather than a merge.

rivka has done them from there with no request for a new thread

That works too.

Paula wrote: "We have normally just added them to the GR Author merge thread for rivka - with a comment indicating the fix required rather than a merge.

rivka has done them from there with no request for a new ..."

OK, just done that.

ok, got it :)

Paula wrote: "We have normally just added them to the GR Author merge thread for rivka - with a comment indicating the fix required rather than a merge.

rivka has done them from there with no request for a new thread"

Yeah, they're close enough (and infrequent enough) that another thread would be superfluous.