Author pages—you control 'em
Sharp-eyed users will notice a new feature—author pages. Author pages, linked to from within your catalog and elsewhere, list an author's books, who owns them and so forth. This is a toe-in-the-water announcement. Coming days will see more features, including "similar authors" and a Wiki-like ability to add author home pages. Suggestions are, as always, encouraged.
There's something daring in how the feature is implemented: users control the catalog. Some of you have noticed problems with two editions of the same book not always being counted as the same. Well, the problem is even worse with authors. Not only does LibraryThing draw on five Amazons and 30+ libraries around the world, but as anyone familiar with Library of Congress searching will tell you, author names often vary within a single catalog. Is Joanne K. Rowling the author of Harry Potter und der Orden des Phönix the same as J. K. Rowling the author of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix? A computer can't tell, but I'll bet you can.
In fact, the computer guesses pretty well, presenting a list of likely aliases for in the "Also known as…" section. You can check these authors out by clicking on their names. If they're really the same, and you're feeling generous, go ahead and click "combine." The authors will be smoothed together, with the more common name winning. I've gone through some of the better-known authors—the rest are up to you.
Be bold! The system is self-correcting. If you screw up and combine two authors who aren't really the same—eg., Thomas Wolfe and Tom Wolfe—someone will notice. Clicking "separate" will break them apart again.
Finally, although combined on a global, statistical level, user data is NEVER changed. Call her Jenny Rowling for all I care. Nothing's going to change that data.
Again, they'll be some improvements, but the core functionality is there. I'm eager to see how it gets used.
There's something daring in how the feature is implemented: users control the catalog. Some of you have noticed problems with two editions of the same book not always being counted as the same. Well, the problem is even worse with authors. Not only does LibraryThing draw on five Amazons and 30+ libraries around the world, but as anyone familiar with Library of Congress searching will tell you, author names often vary within a single catalog. Is Joanne K. Rowling the author of Harry Potter und der Orden des Phönix the same as J. K. Rowling the author of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix? A computer can't tell, but I'll bet you can.
In fact, the computer guesses pretty well, presenting a list of likely aliases for in the "Also known as…" section. You can check these authors out by clicking on their names. If they're really the same, and you're feeling generous, go ahead and click "combine." The authors will be smoothed together, with the more common name winning. I've gone through some of the better-known authors—the rest are up to you.
Be bold! The system is self-correcting. If you screw up and combine two authors who aren't really the same—eg., Thomas Wolfe and Tom Wolfe—someone will notice. Clicking "separate" will break them apart again.
Finally, although combined on a global, statistical level, user data is NEVER changed. Call her Jenny Rowling for all I care. Nothing's going to change that data.
Again, they'll be some improvements, but the core functionality is there. I'm eager to see how it gets used.
posted by Tim at 6:23 PM
24 Comments:
WOW. I love it!
Hopefully, you'll be able to extend this to 'other authors' soon. I have a lot of books, relatively speaking, whose real authors are getting short shrift. Editors and introductory essayists are well and good, but I'd like to be able to link the books to others by their primary authors. Anthologies (even those with a limited number of contributors - 3, say, or 8 or 12) - seem especially problematic. Last time I checked, not more than four or five names could be added. Whereas up to a dozen would really help. (I know, I know!! Just asking for the moon. :) At that stage you can still be dealing with full-length works (novellas and plays) - rather than mere excerpts, which it's rather silly to bother about attributing individually. In any case, I'd love Addison and Steele to get some recognition for their part in The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from the Tatler and Spectator, rather than Erin Skye Mackie; and if their names ever link my volume of Twelve Famous Plays of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century to their works in other libraries, so much the better!
It's a wonderful feature: I can't wait to play with it! Thanks for making it user-controlled. That's exceedingly welcome. At the risk of sounding like a broken record - and one of a chorus - LT really does keep getting better and better. - Enough, somehow, to keep surprising me.
Magnificent!
this is great, tim, i'm feeling very useful right about now. out of curiosity, will this eventually lead to a fixed author cloud?
of course, even if it doesn't, i'll still be thrilled with LT as always.
nperrin
Will there be a mechanism to combine non-suggested authors, like "Pope John Paul II" and "Karol Józef Wojtyła" or "Dr. Suess" and "Theodor Seuss Geisel"?
Interesting idea. I can't wait to see how it plays out.
But there seems to be a bug in the way the books are
counted. If I go to the author page for Rex Stout, it says I have 11 books by him. But if I click on the "11" to get a list of those books, I see that I actually have 27 (unique) titles by Rex Stout...
-- Wombat
A couple of small things:
While selecting 'see all books by this author' (or whatever it says) works beautifully, every time I try to 'see all 96 users,' I get the following error:
This author does not appear to exist.
You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ') AND books_sort_author NOT IN ('author.php') AND books_sort_ - fatal error (5*)
Also, I notice that some apparently unambiguous authors still reflect only part of what I own - until you click on the number shown; the actual books displayed will be correct. In some cases, it seems to be volumes I entered manually that are not being counted on the author page. In other cases, I've no idea. With Rex Stout, it is certainly happening in other libraries, too, as I'm familiar with several of those collections, and can swear most of us own at least triple what's being shown. Personally, I'm listed as owning 11 of his books. :) I have 61.
It's still immensely fun. Thanks!
(This is what I get for slow thinking: looking redundant! ;)
Is it just me or have we now lost the "see more" feature? Nothing happens when I click on it.
I have the same problem with John Dickson Carr. It first tells I have three books. When I click to see 'all 55 books' (I assume this all variants of spelling, etc), I then have nine books. I belive all mine are entered the same way. Guess I should double check . . .
They're all entered the same. Funny, I actually have 6, not 3, not 9.
bugs
"see books" is not working from my computer
some authors don't have author's page when you click on them from the catalog. the link just goes to http://www.librarything.com/author/
question
how to suggest authors to combine them? I have two Hayakawa books that appear as two different authors and they are just the same one. they do not appear ready to combine. how to suggest?
Lovely, this is fun!
*runs through her catalogue clicking combine*
Here come the agruments, I just clicked combine on:
David Eddings
Leigh Eddings
David and Leigh Eddings
I'm sure someone will come along and separate them out again *eg*
Would be good to be able to suggest others so psuedonyms can be grouped together. It's neat seeing the possibiliities increase.
Can we have combination feature for books as well?
Oh, I like!
But I note that I cannot combine "Lewis Carroll" with "Charles Dodgson" or "Mark Twain" with "Samuel Clemens"!
And oddly there is no suggestion of combining "Basho" and "Matsuo Basho" which I'd have thought would be an obvious suggestion.
So I'm in agreement with gfvonb's comment: let us combine non-suggested authors!
I can tell already, though, that I'm going to have way to much fun with this feature.
When I click on an author whose name contains an apostrophe, I get an error.
Lots of weird things still seem to apply to author names with special characters in them. "Tóibín" won't give you any suggestion for "Toibin" for example.
Another interesting problem is what to do about authors who have the same name. Right now they get lumped together with no way of separating them.
I've just noticed that some suggestions don't appear for combining Authors:
"Patrick Süskind" is 'sskindpatrick' but 'suskindpatrick' is "Patrick Suskind".
The latter suggested "Suskind" which I combined, but neither mentions the correct and most common spelling with the umlaut to be combined.
This is pretty nice, thanks! Would there be a way to click on the ratings that a author recieves, and see which books are involved? In otherwords, if an author has alot of 5's and then a boatload of 2's, are these due to a single book with different opinions, or two complete different books of different quality?
For anyone else who is amused by such things: of the 5,234 copies of the "bible" that a LT search returns, only 13 users list the author as God. According to author data, God has authored two major best-sellers, the Bible (in various editions) and the Koran. God's user rating stands at 4, based on 1 rating. (LibraryThing users won't even cut the almighty some slack on ratings.) ;^)
So Tim - will those so inclined be able do a God/Jesus Christ author combo? Or would that just be pushing it. ;)
I have noticed, as have others, that for some authors there is no author page, and I frequently get timed out. This seems to happen most often when I have made an entry and then edited the author's name. (I have no idea why that should have an impact, but it seems to be the case.)
Undesireable hard wrapping!
I just loaded up an Author Page, and it looks like hard returns are inserted between each user's book count and the comma following. Like this:
--------------------
Author: Kevin Henkes
Users with books by Kevin Henkes
Wombat (9)
, kidlitlist (7)
, lisamichele (3)
, tina81450 (2)
, wenestvedt (2)
--------------------
Weird.
But the feature itself is just dandy -- keep up the innovation, Tim! Even if you burn out spectacularly, plenty of people will sift thourgh the wreckage and keep developing all the cool ideas they find! :7)
I combined "Gary S. Becker" and "Gary Stanley Becker", which seemed to work like a charm. There's a "(6)" after my username, which is correct for the combined total. However, when I click on the "(6)" to see which books I own, it only shows me the three with "Gary S. Becker" (the author page I started with), not the three with "Gary Stanley Becker" as the author. Reloading the page yielded the same results.
Cool feature, though. :)
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