Beta/unofficial features launch
Update: I'm going to give this another day of "beta." I updated the About Works and Books page. I'm going to work on making the "combine" feature less cluttered, and the "separate" feature more responsive.
A suite of new features have been launched in beta. The core feature is a change in the relationship between books, adding a robust concept of "works" to tie different editions together. This behind-the-scenes change has allowed a cascade of other, seemingly unrelated changes.
I plan to watch the site today, and receive in the blog comments, on the Google group and by email. I'll make changes and launch the features officially tomorrow. If you plan to blog the changes, I'd prefer if you did it tomorrow, when things are more stable. The same goes for praise and blame—to the extent you can, hold it, and if you are minded, give me solid, specific feedback.
The new features include:
A suite of new features have been launched in beta. The core feature is a change in the relationship between books, adding a robust concept of "works" to tie different editions together. This behind-the-scenes change has allowed a cascade of other, seemingly unrelated changes.
I plan to watch the site today, and receive in the blog comments, on the Google group and by email. I'll make changes and launch the features officially tomorrow. If you plan to blog the changes, I'd prefer if you did it tomorrow, when things are more stable. The same goes for praise and blame—to the extent you can, hold it, and if you are minded, give me solid, specific feedback.
The new features include:
- Book combine/separate, available from author pages and the card-catalog page of a book. I took a swing at a few of my favorite authors (even getting into Rowling and Dan Brown), but the process is only beginning. I have also yet to fully explain the LibraryThing "way" of works.
- Substantially-revised book-info pages (eg., social, card-catalog and edit pages)
- Book-info pages include Amazon and user-supplied cover images.
- Book-info pages now link to a number of booksellers as well as the OCLC "Find in a Library" service.
- The change-cover feature has been improved. You can now snag covers from the 23,000 users have already uploaded.
- Social pages now offer enhanced book recommendations in various flavors, such as "weighted," "raw" and "exclude author" (useful when every recommended book is by the same person).
- All-LibraryThing title and author searching, available from the search tab.
- Card-catalog pages now show LCCNs and Deweys for most books from Amazon—and more will get them as the work system fills out. At present, these are not available on the catalog view, but they will be, along with clickable LC Subjects.
- MARC records for many books, often many of them.
posted by Tim at 8:38 AM
172 Comments:
1) I'd love to join; I've only entered 35 books, but I'm setting aside some time at the end of the week to do more. I can't find a link to pay the $25 ... might want to make that slightly more prominent, or at least link to it from the "about" page.
2) Is there a way to tell it "arrange by tags"?
Hey Tim,
The edition combinations seem to be working great so far, but I have had one problem. I've been combining works for the author Haruki Murakami and the titles that I assume are in Japanese aren't showing up as Japanese characters for me. This could be my browser, maybe, but I think it's not (Firefox/WindowsXPpro) because I get such characters normally. Also, it doesn't matter to me because I can't read them, but I figure someone will want to.
nperrin
I love it. I love it. One bug I've noted so far (only been playing with it a few minutes): for similarly tagged books, A Confederacy of Dunces throws up 10 copies of...A Confederacy of Dunces. I guess that's technically true, but probably not what you were going for...
Also, is there ever going to be a way for non-computer-suggested authors to be combined? I just took the accent off my books written by Julio Cortazar so they would properly combine with the more popular non-accented version.
But that's a silly gripe! Love the book combining, it will probably eat my entire productive day.
--kelsey
I know you asked to wait on bugs but just as an fyi whn I click on the social link within your lastest blog entry I get a "stack overflow at line 0". Using MSIE 6.0.29
can it remember if we'd like the works of an author sorted by works or by work title after we've combined something?
I second the reqest for a memory of how it was sorted after we combine titles.
I am finding combination alright but am having difficutly separating. I started on the Hitchhikers Guide. The title "The Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy" is used for at least 5 works. The first volume of the series, the collections of 3 4 and 5 books and the radio scripts, not to mention audio recordings. When I click separate and confim on the pop up nothing happens to the list.
I hope the linking for works containing others will apper soon.
I like the idea of it remembering whether you wanted titles sorted by copies or by work title.
And a suggestion: Could we have a combine button at the bottom of the page in addition to the top? Thanks again, I LOVE it!
nperrin
Great work, Tim. I'll use it today and see if any problems arise. Here's a small one I just found: on the revised social pages it often says "1 review" even when there are no reviews (and the "1 review" link is dead). Here is an specific example.
Tim-
I think I found something unintended or, perhaps, a misunderstanding on my behalf. I combined two books, Vol. I and Vol. II of "Economics" by Bruce Knight. Before combining them, it showed I was the only person who owned each book in the social info. After combining them into a single work, the number of people who owned the book was two--both myself. So, perhaps it is not intended to combine two volumes or it is double-counting.
Nevertheless, great job, if there are any bugs, they don't seem to cause any real trouble. However, I'm curious if it would be beneficial to add a "volume", "number", and "issue" field. Then it would be possible to add academic journals and combine them under a single work.
aaaah, I was right - Sorcerer's Stone won over Philosopher's Stone. Sigh. I know it doesn't affect my catalogue, and I like getting recommendations based on what people with the American edition read - it's just that I object on principle to the American publisher's changes to a book that was just fine the way it was. Of course, Scholastic made changes to all the other Harry Potter books too, but at least they didn't change the titles too. I'd like to see a way to force the system to accept the less numerous title in cases like this and for books written in languages other than English where the official title should be the one in the language of its original publication, rather than the possibly more common English translation. It just seems fairer that way. We live in an awfully
English-language centric world and I think we're poorer for it.
Anyway, I'm sure you have plenty to work on without this and maybe nobody cares except me, but it would be nice to have this option. Just something to keep in mind if you ever run out of things to do in future :)
Harry Potter boxed sets seem to be grouped by paperback, hardback and adult versions, rather than by 3, 4, 5 or 6 books. Again I can't seem to separate to recombine.
Comments on the revised catalog card pages:
In re: "This Book" and "Work Data" -- we're fumbling for good language here. I think "This Copy" might be better than "This Book" (it always refers to an individual user's copy, yes?). Perhaps "Work Data" could be "Other Copies and Editions of This Title"? That seems clearer to me, and perhaps to visitors.
"User Data" might be clearer as "User's Data for This Copy"
"LCCN" actually stands for Library of Congress Control Number (originally Library of Congress Card Number): one of the 98-12345 numbers. This field should be labeled "LC Call Number"
An earlier problem that now becomes conspicuous: the title field seems to have a character limit, and so often get truncated in an awkward manner. Lots of older works with long titles, as well as academic books with lengthy subtitles, get chopped in the middle. It would be great if the title field could be lengthened.
Proofreading: at the bottom of the card-catalog it says "See all Marc records" -- most common usage would be MARC rather than Marc.
I'm a bit confused by the different ways you treat translations. In some instances you say to treat them as the same work ("Italian and English-language editions of a book are the same work"), but then you tell us not to combine a Greek edition of Homer with the English translation.
Why is the former the "same" and the latter not? There doesn't seem to be any bright line, any clear distinction, here.
And what about dual-language editions?
Translations:
I think of them in terms of work-logic's end use, which I see to be recommendations. So, if you have a German edition of Jose Saramago's Blindness, you might very well want to see recommendations for similar books in English and other languages; but if you had a Greek edition of Homer, you probably aren't interested in the Great Books recommendations that an English edition will throw out. Yeah, admittedly fuzzy. I would put a dual language edition in with translations of the book.
--kelsey
about translations: i think the problem might be best addressed with a field to specify language. then, theoretically, you could get only latin recommendations or only french recommendations or whatever, and the works could be combined. (a translator field would also be nice.)
I've been playing with these changes, and boy are there some obvious combines. There are also some spelling mistakes and some of these are becoming the preferred title.
Will the zeitgeist be changed to show number of works rather than (or in addition to) the number of books?
BTW - I do like this change, although I also want to keep using the sort order I specify. Personally I would have preferred a bit more ajaxy stuff on this page as well. Maybe a drag and drop to combine (if that isn't too dangerous) could be added.
Finally on a not quite unrelated note, I've noticed a few authors being considered as one person when in fact they are multiple people. David Bailey for example - combines the books of the famous photographer and the not so famous Doctor Who anthologist. Are you thinking of having an author ID so that same named writers can be disambiguated?
Andyl, which spelling mistakes are you finding? I've had someone peering over my shoulder telling me that "Traveler" is spelled incorrectly (which in British English it would be) but it's the spelling on my copy of "The Time Traveler's Wife", so it's the one I'll use. But "If On A Winter's Night A Traveller" has two Ls because it is what is on the book. There may be a number of language-related issues like that.
Ian Banks is a better example of actual misspelling, though - the Iain M. Banks and Iain Banks who inhabit the same body are *not* the Dr Ian Banks who writes Haynes Manuals for people, despite the people who have entered I(M)B titles with that spelling of the name. Identifying people who have misentered names and commenting on their profiles seems unduly harsh, however annoying this is.
How do we "do" book separation?
I have six different issues of Kimono Hime (http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?tag=kimonohime. Each was searched/entered individually via Amazon.co.jp. For some reason the (separate) ISBNs didn't carry over properly from Amazon Japan, so I entered them individually.
Yet, LibraryThing says that LT'ers own six copies of each issue - whereas in reality, I am the sole owner at present, owning only one copy of each.
I don't see a way of separating these out on the individual record Edit pages. Do you foresee that coming along, or do I need to re-enter the lot of them manually?
This is truly not a big deal, but it's my sole example of a needed book separation, so I'm curious!
Are you thinking of having an author ID so that same named writers can be disambiguated?
This is the perfect use for the LC Authorities database (authorities.loc.gov). There is a unique LCCN (Library of Congress Control Number) in field 010 of each authority record -- this could be "attached" to LT author pages. The LC records link all the alternate forms of each name that LC has recorded, and they usually provide dates that allow for disambiguation of homonyms.
Any chance of getting the Combine books button placed at the bottom of the list, as well as the top? It's a small thing, but would save scrolling back to the top after scrolling to the bottom ticking.
The one that caught my eye was Poul Anderson's "Conan The Rebel" - the definitive title in librarything at the moment is "Conan The Revel".
I totally agree with Traveler / Traveller. I catalogue as the title appears on the title page.
I have also noted a number of books which have the publisher in parentheses as part of the title (probably comes that way from Amazon). Some people have used the title for what I would use the comments for (eg. Panther book 895). Some people have even put by Authorname in the title. I am also somewhat irked by people who put the publisher's tagline for the book in the title when it isn't part of the real title of the book (eg. Bodily Harm : the new novel by Margaret Atwood). But then I am somewhat of a perfectionist.
Might be better to have "sort by work title" as the default... I'm finding it a lot easier to find the combineable books that way.
I've been working with the new combine/separate feature for books for a little while now to see how it works; specifically, I've been trying to tidy up the works of people like Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker, Brian K Vaughan, etc. where several different books by them have previously been considered as the same 'work' even though they were completely different books.
I have two main thoughts so far.
One, it would be really good if "Sort by title" was the default sort used rather than "Sort by copies", as this makes the work of spotting what to combine much easier. It's a tad annoying having to resort every time a selection is combined.
Two, I must admit to having some concern about 'ping-pong' changes, where correct combinations could either get messed up either by error or by deliberate 'vandalism'. Perhaps there should be some way of 'locking' correct combinations so they can't be separated?
I must admit I am a bit worried about ping-pong as well. Not for the obvious cases but for variant titles, especially British/American differences. It isn't obvious to people who don't do the research (or know) that James Blish's "A Clash Of Cymbals" and "The Triumph Of Time" are the same work.
Clicked on "Sayers, Dorothy L." Instead of an author page, I got a page that said, "This author does not appear to exist."
Could have fooled me! Who wrote all those books, then?
can there be a way for the edition to be noted on each review? look at the new page for dante's inferno, for example...
Earlier I posted this naive question:
How do we "do" book separation?
Since then I discovered how (and where) to do the book separation. So now everything's hunky-dory.
{emilylitella} Never mind! {/emilylitella}
P.S. Blogger.com tells me that the {emilylitella} tag is not allowed. Such a pity. If there's one tag that the LibraryThing blog needs... ;-)
First, THANK you for all the feedback with this feature.
I spent the day "monitoring the site," which meant monitoring the inside of my eyelids and waking up once in a while to see if the server was still up. Now I have 25 messages—questions, suggestions and bugs—to work on. I am going to post my replies (and follow-up questions) here and at the Google group, and where a name was given, also on people's profiles.
Incidentally, the the system *does* keep track of changes. In the long run that's one of the ways to guard against ratty data. In the short run it allows me to announce the WALL OF HONOR, the number of title combinations effected by users since morning. Wow, thanks!
andyl (208)
nperrin (202)
hippietrail (175)
kelsey (164)
Christophilus (112)
ringman (97)
EdwardLacey (84)
tortoise (76)
maripoezia (75)
jaime_d (71)
marietherese (63)
Aquila (50)
Chrisophilus (49)
HoldenCarver (40)
starcat (34)
Malte (31)
selfnoise (24)
One of my medium-term plans is for LibraryThing to have some "librarian status." This status might allow users to "lock" things into place. Or it might just be the equivalent to the "barn-raiser" medals people give out at Wikipedia--a nifty symbol expressing the community's thanks.
Until then, blog-thanks will have to do...
Woohoo, squeezing in at last place! :)
Translations:
I don't think the rationale for the different treatment of translations makes sense, and I think it amounts to (almost certainly unconsciously) English chauvinism; that someone with an Italian edition of a book originally written in English would want to be "connected to" people who owned the English original, while people owning an English edition of Dante wouldn't want to be connected to people owning the Italian original. The intent seems to be drawing a line between Great Works and contemporary literature, but where that line should be drawn is murky, and it seems like it will create a lot of confusion and cycles of combining and separating of translations.
Personally, I'd be enough of an absolutist that if I were making the decisions I'd keep all translations as separate works, even to the point of keeping different translations into the same language separate; I have two different translations of _Beowulf_, for instance, and they're very different. This is a matter of opinion, and mine certainly appears to be a minority one, but I think a consistent policy on translations (whatever it ends up being) would be far clearer than the current one.
Great! However:
Combining books is done much faster than separating them. This might be a problem...
...as is obvious if you look at an author like Proust. Here lots and lots of separating has to be done from the start, in order to get works right, and it's just to slow to be practicable.
Can we have a combination ruling on screenplays of novels, and study notes for novels/plays/poetry etc? I have a number of study guides where the author of the original work is given as the original author, and I've already separated one instance and had it recombined out from under me! (The title does make it clear that it is a study guide.)
I second the suggestion to have "sort by title" be the default.
Wow, and the combine button just appeared at the bottom! Such service.
Thirding the "sort by title" default request. It'd make the larger authors more manageable.
A further thought: when an author has a lot of works, trying to spot the right ones to combine can be a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack. If there was some way to hide a selection of works from view so that there's less visual 'noise' on screen in necessary would be great.
For example, for the works of Warren Ellis, some of his works are easy to combine and get out of the way (such as Transmetropolitan), but with some of his other, lesser-know works, like Strange Kisses, it's harder to tell which two editions are the same. It's also harder to see them among his other works. So it would be nice if I could say something to the effect of "I don't need to see all these books which I'm positive are all correctly combined into single works now, and I'd just like to see the ones that I'm unsure of."
I'm not sure how you'd make that work, and it's probably not a high-priority feature anyway, but I just thought I'd throw it out there while I'm thinking of these things.
Idle thought: it might be nice to have a link to authors whose works we've combined, so we can show off or take up working where we paused. On the other hand, I don't know how resource-intensive that would be, nor how difficult.
I second the suggestion to hide/show a subset of works by the auther. I've been wading through Carolyn Keene (Nancy Drew), and the incredibly varied series spellings would go much faster if I could, e.g., search for "old diary", then (probably) check all the results, and click combine.
I have struck the same "needle in a haystack" problem that a few people have mentioned.
A lot of fun was "Brave New World" vs "Brave New World Revisited" vs "Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited" vs the Cliff Notes to them! ... not to mention the various translations ...
I can think of two ways to reduce the haystack:
a) Reduce "mostly combined" lists to a single entry - this will reduce scrolling.
b) Allow a substring search just in the combining area. If I could search just for "world" or just "revisited" there would have been less work.
On the "Screenplays" issue. I would not under any circumstances combine a book with any of: screenplay, movie, or soundtrack - and, yes, people have begun adding music and films.
A screenplay is a completely different work from the novel it may be based on - it may even be written by or with the aid of different people. Also it's possible for there be first a screenplay, then a movie, then a novelization of the movie which was never a novel before. This would also be a separate work.
It's really quite a bit different from a translation, which is for the most part a 1:1 change as much as possible. Books and screenplays can have a large amount added, removed, or changed.
I'm probably jumping the gun on this, but, now that it automatically sorts by title, I can't seem to make it sort by copies, no matter how much I click it.
angharad,
me neither. i was sort of using both, but i guess if i had to pick one it would be title. (i noticed that the link url for "copies" is the same as the page's original url, so it's just not directing you anywhere new).
-nperrin
I've been doing some combining, and I had a thought/wish-pony for the future. Would it be possible for Librarything to associate individual novels in compilations (say, Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer in the compilation Shadow and Claw) with the individually-packaged novels? Not sure how this would be done, but it could be a neat feature.
Which brings me to the translations/versions difficulty... maybe there could be some way to have different levels/kinds of association?
Here's a long person-by-person reply. I'm not sure I'll be able to get to much of this tonight. I'm feeling a little under-the-weather.
To Anonymous, with question about paying. To pay, go to your profile and find the "upgrade" button. It should be more prominent. As for tag-arranging, try clicking the top of the "tag" column. This will sort your books by the first tag in a book. Is that what you're looking for?
nperrin, on Murakami and Japanese character. I am seeing Japanese characters on both the author and work-combination pages, so it might be on your end. (I can hope, anyway.) This does, however, raise the issue of what happens to Japanese works when books get combined. The LibraryThing system favors library titles over Amazon titles, and library records romanize. We'll see how this one plays out.
Kelsey, on multiple tag-suggestions. I know. That bug has me tearing my hair out in frustration! I'll get to work on it again tonight.
As for non-suggested author combinations, yes, it needs to do that. The way I plan to do that is to tie the search feature--author and work search--into the combination engine.
Norman. You say that clicking on the social book, yields "stack overflow at line 0"? Arg. I'll have to play with it on a PC. If anyone has an idea of what's going on, let me know.
People requesting the author combine features "sticks." Good idea. I'm on it.
Ringman, and others with trouble separating. Douglas Adams is a good test case. I do find it working, but it's working a way that's non-obvious. I like the way combining works. Separating doesn't satisfy me GUI-wise. I'll revisit soon.
nperrin, on adding a combine button on the bottom. Quit it with the unreasonable requests! Okay, done. It only appears if there are more than five works.
RJO, with the 1-review bug. Good catch. Thanks. Fixed.
genericface, with volume-combining questions. For now, don't combine volumes. I'm going to add a "related books" feature to cover that, I think.
tardis, on the Philosopher's Stone losing to the Sorceror's Stone. What can I say? USA! USA! USA! Woot! Woot Woot! Okay, sorry.
I may allow people to choose from among the various library-titles. Weighing against this, however, are issues like this. I don't want "edit wars" at LibraryThing.
That said, deep down, I know you're right about this one.
RJO on "fumbling for good language. Yes, you're right. All your changes were good; I either made them outright or rethought the issue and made another change.
It's hard to find the right terms. There are library terms—or anyway library-technology terms--like "manifestations." And other terms, like edition, don't quite fit the bill. To LibraryThing, an "edition" is a title and an author. The same book cataloged by two different authorities (eg., Amazon and the LC) can come out as two LT "editions." The whole thing is tricky and irritating.
Mea maxima culpa on the LC Call Number. I knew that.
Lilithcat, Kelsey and others on combining or not-combining translations. I know I have to engage on this issue with the LT community. This is not an easy issue, and I want to explore some technical options for marking other "relationships." So, consider this issue shelved for a day or two, okay?
Andyl on titles, etc. While it is true that a misspelling *can* be the work title, it would have to be the most common form of the title (or, under certain circumstances, tied). In general, I think this will happen rarely. There is an embrace-the-mess thing going on here that I want people to understand. Just as with Wikipedia, LibraryThing will not always be right, or even right as often as a library. Other things compensate, I hope.
On authors-separation, that's coming. I for one would like to separate Steve Martin the author of "Cruel Shoes" from Steve Martin the author of "Britain and the Slave Trade."
I'll be Ajax-ing the separation stuff up a bit.
Trivia: The author and work disambiguation systems are not in any way linked. But, in theory, if you combine two works, they ought to have the same author too. There are some tricky issues there, but also some potential.
Chamekke on separation. I'll revisit the separation later tonight or tomorrow, and use your example.
Anonymous on "ping-pong changes." The main guard against this will be, as with Wikipedia, a change-log. This log is being made now, but it's not exposed. At some point--a few weeks?--the change-log should become manageable to skim through from time to time, by me or by others who feel bored and helpful.
Other solutions:
If necessary, I can restrict changes to users who have a certain number of books (to guard against malicious changes).
I can add a "change explanation" field when you make a change that shouldn't be reversed. The next person would see it when they tried to reverse it.
And I can contemplate "locking" certain changes in.
Anonymous on seeing editions in the review. That's an interesting idea. I may add it, or make it an option.
"when an author has a lot of works, trying to spot the right ones to combine can be a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack." I'm going to add a "show|hide details" link to the combine page. When hid, you will only see the works, not the copies and editions underneath.
AndyHat on anthologies. Hmmm... I think this will be accomplished when I allow combinations from the search results page.
AndyHat, "Is there a way to disambiguate editions where the title and author are identical?" No, there is not. Because LibraryThing has no "core" to fall back on—data comes from all sorts of places and of varying quality—and because title/author pairs are central to most calculations (recommendations, for example), LibraryThing bases everything on the title and author.
What can be done? In theory, certain books could be marked as problem books, in which circumstances some other factor (like ISBN or publisher) could be taken into account. Let's let things settle down a bit and evaluate the extent of the problem before making any decisions about this.
Hippietrail on screenplays. I agree with you entirely. I don't think screenplays should be combined. They are separate, derivative works.
Ultimately, however, I want all discussion of what or what should not be combined to circle back on the issue "what is combination FOR." There is no here here. This does not depend upon the meaning of it. We are not deciding on platonic forms, we are deciding on functionality. Combinations are FOR something—mostly connecting people and generating recommendations.
Angharad on malfunctioning sorts. Fixed that just now. Sorry.
Selfnoise. I'm going to think about other forms of association. The associations I can come up with--that doesn't mean I'll implement!--are:
Contains/is contained by
Contents overlap with
Translation of
I am NOT going to do "is a later edition of," "builds upon the concepts of," "has more sexy vampires than," etc.
Has fricking anyone gotten to the end of this? This is insane. Great. But insane.
Will there be a print 3x5 index card feature at some point?
Like they have at allrecipes.com or some such?
There will be a print library card feature...
There should be a FoodThing, so you can connect with people who ate what you ate last night.
here's a thought for the ping-pong issue: beyond just the change log, why not offer information on each combine page that shows when the last edits were made and who they were made by? it would add some very upfront accountability to the combining task, and it would also allay confusion about whether a work was combined or separated earlier by someone who knows the work better than you do (something i've run into a few times tonight.)
a slightly amusing bug: despite separating the authors, many, many editions of gray's anatomy show up under spalding gray as author
"Douglas Adams is a good test case"
Oh dear, I just finished working on him, now everybody will come and criticise what I've done. Well, if they can find out which collections - 3, 4, 5 vols. - belong together, they're more than welcome! ;)
I see that work titles are now capitalized. I don't like it, it's wrong on non-english books and it's not a library thing(!), but I know it's been discussed before, so my question now is only if what you call special characters can be capitalized too. For example in this, if you really want all those words to be capitalized, then æ should be Æ and å should be Å, please!
Apart from that: Very nice changes. :)
It doesn't seem possible yet to combine "authorless" works (for instance: one edition of the Bible with multiple bindings, and thus, multiple ISBNs). Can this be rectified?
Also, an "editor" field would be helpful.
Tim said:
Chamekke on separation. I'll revisit the separation later tonight or tomorrow, and use your example.
Oh no - please don't!
I guess you didn't see my later message, in which I confessed that I had (finally) figured out how to do it properly and for myself. In fact it works just fine.
And just so you know: that's a terrific feature. Thanks very much for adding it!
I thought I'd have a look at Asimov to see how the 'work' feature works - made some progress but also found a couple of 'opportunities' for improvement. One is the old request to have a title sort that ignores articles: 'the, a, an' would be great for the time being. The second is to ask for a 'case insensitive' title sort.
These two would mean that 'Caves of Steel'; The Caves of Steel' and 'The caves of steel' showed up together instead of widely separated.
That said - great upgrade, well done Tim.
Kelsey. The change-log will be available book-by-book, so you can see at a glance how much and what work's been done on a work.
Grayhead. I changed the sort on the author combination page to ignore "the," "a," "an" and so forth. (How do I work with the German "Die" without messing with "Die another Day"?) I don't think the upper/lower-case issue was real, but I lowercase the title now before I sort.
Translated works: if each translation was it's own work, the whole concept would be useless to me, and most non-English people. My library is maybe half translated (most originally English titles) half original language. So half of my library would not be connected to anything. For instance, most of my Asimov's are in Finnish, but I'd still like my copy of Teräsluolat to be connected to the "The Caves of Steel" work rather than be it's own entity.
As for work title: how about giving users the chance to vote for the best work title? If there is a problematic work title, just ask anyone interested to cast their vote. I'd think this would work pretty well and would create a nice, democratic solution for the best title.
As for HHGttG, the books are separate entities. There are no two ways about it. Adams meant them separately.
I changed the sort on the author combination page to ignore "the," "a," "an" and so forth.
Wonderful - stop to check my e-mail come back and the sort is fixed.
(How do I work with the German "Die" without messing with "Die another Day"?)
I don't think you do - and, at least at the moment, the Foreign titles are in a small minority in most places I've looked. I hate to think what the full international list of articles would look like. 'If' it becomes a problem - the collectorz.com solution is a separate 'sort title field' to give 'Die Another Day','' and 'Anderen Tag','Die'
I don't think the upper/lower-case issue was real, but I lowercase the title now before I sort.
It was very real this morning - had me baffled for a while when I couldn't find titles I'd seen thirty seconds before. On a short list it probably won't show up but Asimov is long - 34 pages when I printed it out last night. With the new sort I've immediately found half-a-dozen merges that I'd missed before.
Printing gives me another 'wish' for the list - to have css with media:printer to leave off the right colun and some of the title bar. (I get round this with the Firefox Aadvark extension - it reduced the Asimov list from 46 to 34 pages.)
Tim,
A weird one for separation.
For Philip K. Dick.
I'm looking at Radio Free Albemuth. The first entry is "Gender and Community Policing: Walking the Talk (The Northeastern Series on Gender, Crime and Law)" by Susan L. Miller. I've tried to separate using the tools but it still shows as Radio Free Albemuth.
Any ideas?
Another "majority rule isn't always right" issue: The Reluctant Widow by Georgette Heyer by Georgette Heyer (sic) is the predominant title for the work, which is patently awful. That's not the only title of hers to suffer that way, and I'm sure it's true of many other works too. It would be really good to have some kind of 'privileges' system going. A note system like Wikipedia have for changes might also be good - James Patterson, for instance, had a number of early works retitled and the new titles bear no resemblance to the old ones so I can imagine someone will unlink them in error before long. I spent quite a lot of time last night linking up foreign/transatlantic translations, too [being irritated again in passing that the "...Shoes" titles of Noel Streatfield outnumber the original titles in many cases - this would be less annoying if they hadn't been sold under the original titles in the US too at one time] and it will be frustrating if people go around undoing them because they are not literal translations. At least one of the Discworld German titles looks like it might belong to a different book if you didn't know better, that being the nature of puns in translation.
Argh, the note above was me but apparently Blogger won't let me sign in and it ate the rest of the line about 'privileges'. Being able to lock certain copies together would be very handy [with only another privilege holder unable to unlock again]. I am sure there'd be a suitably long list of volunteers for routine maintenance stuff along these lines.
--Bopeepsheep
"the collectorz.com solution is a separate 'sort title field' to give 'Die Another Day','' and 'Anderen Tag','Die' "
Another way used in some MARC variants is to put the article inside a special character combination like <<article>>. Depends on the user to do it right though, it can't be automated.
Of course there are also titles in English where automated sorting gets it wrong. ;)
To makis: I agree with you that not linking originals to translations would mean having made absolutely no improvement for us.
But I don't like the idea of the "democratic" vote for the "best" title, since it's likely that the English ones would always win. My opinion instead is that the "standard" title MUST be the one the author has given to his/her work, not what the US-UK users of LT prefer.
I'm just passionate about it because otherwise it wouldn't seem much respectful to me.
tim, the FONT SIZE chosen for the 'similarly tagged' list on the social pages is too small. Can it be sized back up a notch or two?
I like the idea of having explainatory fields for changes. For combined books, these would be very useful for letting other users know if a book is the same as the parent work but just having a different title.
For separted books, however, would such a note be able to work? I have separted (or not combined) books which have similar titles but which are actually different works - for example, "Runaways vol. 1 - Pride and Joy" is not the same as "Runaways vol. 1", the latter being an oversized HC volume that has twice the content of the small, digest-sized former book. I suspect there are many more Marvel books like this, due to the way they release and number their softcover and hardcover collections, and the way Amazon lists them.
Regarding ambiguous editions, like the "Fake" manga andyhat mentioned above, I think this is something that's going to be very common with manga volumes and with graphic novels too. The 'blame' for this is probably down to Amazon not including volume names or numbers in their catalogue (I used to have great fun carefully looking at the publication date to work out which volume to buy when ordering Iron Wok Jan from Amazon). One way of dealing with this that I can think of would be to flag the work as 'disruptfully ambiguous', and not allow it to be combined with any other works. This could be backed up with perhaps having an alert on a user's profile page saying "You have {x} ambiguous books", and giving them the chance to disambiguate them themselves so they can get the social data and recommendations properly.
Moloch, I agree with you that the original title should be used.
But letting people decide would at least be democratic: if the majority wants to use (one of) the English title, then so be it. I would much prefer this than just picking the most popular title.
Is a boxed set the same as the books collected in a single volume? e.g Chronicles of Narnia. I would say yes as the contents is the same.
If anyone objects message my profile. Otherwise I'll combine these, and any others I find, later in the week (unless someone else does it first! I'll just check LOTR.
Further to my last. I see 3 and 7 volume sets of LOTR are combined with single volume copies so I'll do the same with Narnia. Of course there will be people listing the contents of a boxed set as separate books, (o.k. I did it for LOTR and I'm not changing it,I don't have the box), hopefully when we get contains/contained in linking this will help.
There are also going to be troublesome works like the Compact Oxford English Dictionary which is currently in over half a dozen works and has several diffrent credited authors (and none) was originally 2 volumes (some have listed the volumes separately) and then three volumes including a supplement. Then I bought the supplement separately so listed it separately. And finally it's the same work as the 13 (17 with supplement) volume OED. Then there's the 2nd editon OED 20 volumes or 1 CD. We need combination on the search page for this, I think.
Sorry me again.
When I click to sort my library on shared the numbers are not quite in order. HP & the P's S appears 32nd on the list between Dracula and A Brief History of Time. Are they sorted on edition numbers, while the display is the Work number?
Combining authors again: compare http://www.librarything.com/author/awdryrevw
and the listings for "W. Rev Awdry" (who appears not to have an author page at all, fittingly). Almost all the books listed are under the erroneous version of the name (presumably an Amazon issue), but there seems no way to combine them correctly.
Hey, I'm noticing that reviews don't seem to be showing up on combined works now. Two that I reviewed where the reviews (mine or anyone's) don't show are Little, Big (John Crowley) and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (Susanna Clarke). Looks like a bug?
language (and makis): it's not that *I* want it that way, it's that it SHOULD be so if we want to be correct. That's a fact. I can concede that adding the English translation could be USEFUL always or just in some cases.
Otherwise, we should just stop talking about LT as an authority database (or whatever the correct term in English is...).
About Homer and other "classics", I agree with you, it's impossible to draw a line (is Dante "ancient" enough? or "modern" enough???).
Tim, I don't understand what shall we do with our translations: "consider this issue shelved for a day or two" means it's better to wait??
re missing reviews:
For uncombined books, I don't see reviews now at the "social information" page. I have to click on the "book information", which made a kind of sense, until I noticed that it still shows "member reviews none" on the "social information" page.
Example: http://www.librarything.com/card_card2.php?book=1973945
Moloch, I'm usually a stickler for "correctness" myself, but I think the point here is that LT isn't an authority but a social site. I think if one way is more useful for recommending and linking to other books/humans, then it "should" be done that way here.
On foregin titles, democratic titles, standard titles, etc.
I think rather than letting the jumble of data with its many quirks coming from many sources being the democrary, that either all users, or "librarians" can cast a vote. I have seen a few instances where there are more english titles but in many variants thus leaving a foreign consisten title winning the vote.
As for languages which use other scripts, I certainly want to use them. I already use them for book titles wherever I can (can anybody can help me with my Georgian dictionary?). As has been said the catalogs are the data of the users and the users should be able to catalog as they want. I have also separated and combined most such titles.
I hope that the ability to have non-Latin author names is coming too. I really want my catalog to match the covers and spines of my books.
Language said:
As for the "original title" issue, I disagree with those who think it should be the default. I love languages and appreciate the respect for the author, but get serious: do you really want 300 T'ang Poems showing up as 唐诗三百首?
I think it's up to the owner of that book. In the distant future I would really love it if "librarians" were able to add the native script, romanized version, and "standard" (probably English) for all authors and works. Users could then specify their preferences. As an Australian I want to see "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" but Americans should be able to see "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone". As a language buff I want to see "唐诗三百首" and others should be able to see "300 T'ang Poems". People should be able to choose between: Native script, romanized native language, or their own preferred language.
But I'm prepared to wait a couple of years to get it (-:
There is deffinintly something odd about Rev W. Awdry. My 26 books are entered under the name Awdry, W. Ckicking on the entries in my library I'm told "this author does not appear to exist" Searching authors for Awdry I get a list of 7 topped by W. rev Awdry (44 books) "This author does not appear to exist" either.
The others have 8 or 9 books between them.
Going to the book or social pages from my library works but author links from them give "author ..."
My books were entered on 2006/2/14 by ISBN and Amazon.co.uk. I removed(Railway S.) from the title and added a comment.
oops - was combining and got the following error
SELECT w_title, w_author, authorname_fullname, w_copies FROM work LEFT JOIN authorname ON w_author = authorname_id WHERE w_workcode IN () ORDER BY w_copies DESC
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 ') ORDER BY w_copies DESC' at line 5
Bug report: I went to my profile page, and one of the randomly displayed books was Jean Gonick's Mostrly Ture Confessions. When I click on the link, I get "Error: Work does not exist."
If I search my catalog for the title, it finds it successfully, and I can pull up the book page from there.
Bleah. I should have typed "Mostly True Confessions"
selfnoise said...
Hey, I'm noticing that reviews don't seem to be showing up on combined works now. Two that I reviewed where the reviews (mine or anyone's) don't show are Little, Big (John Crowley) and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (Susanna Clarke). Looks like a bug?
Yup. None of the user reviews are showing up. Two more examples of books with multiple reviews, both mine and others': Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) and Cat's Eye (Margaret Atwood).
On another topic - I also agree with hippietrail that we should be able to use native scripts for titles at our discretion. As it is, I use Kanji and Roumaji and an English translation for all my Japanese titles. I don't believe it's possible to be more flexible than that.
Special editions. The deluxe, illustrated edition of Alice in Wonderland is the same work as a humble Dover edition.
What about the wonderful The Annotated Alice? Or any of the other Annotated series, e.g. The Annotated Sherlock Holmes? There's so much commentary in those books - especially the Holmes volumes - that the marginalia often crowd out the original text.
Not argumentative, just wondering. It's the grey areas that are the most interesting...
I agree with chamekke in the
case of heavily annotated editions, and specifically _The Annotated Alice_; I'd guess that at least half the words in that are in the annotations and commentary, and they make it a very different work. (I see that it isn't combined with _Alice in Wonderland_, though of course I don't know whether that's because nobody has tried or because that's the current state in a back-and-forth.) From the "who owns this book" perspective, I'd be more interested in knowing what people who have the Annotated version have than just knowing what other children's books people with the original have.
Even the simpler "deluxe, illustrated version" is fraught with complications. Is the original graphic novel of Neil Gaiman's _Stardust_ the same as the text-only version? I _think_, though have not personally verified, that all the words are the same, but the images are a major part of the mood and charm of the original.
We're quibbling about edge cases, of course -- the vast majority of combinations aren't going to be of translations, or of editions that differ in major ways, but just of telling LT that "Moby Dick" and "Moby-Dick, or, The Whale" are in fact the same thing. So I think overall it's working great, and it may in fact be best not to set firm policy here (though in the case of translations a _consistent_ policy either way would be nice) and just let them be handled case-by-case.
Two suggestions:
1) One way to quality control combinations would be to restrict to paid members - would prevent opportunistic vandalism and mean that people making changes have some equity in them being correct
2) When entering new book, have a nearest suggested work to add it to, or we'll forever be having to go in and tidy up
TCarter
Tim,
I strongly feel that audio books and print books are not the same work even though the words are the same and would rather see them separated. Some of us use audio books often and others use them rarely. Are these different groups of people? What do other LT people think?
tricia (hailelib)
I can understand why Wim wouldd want audiobooks to be associated with the same 'work' as print editions of the books. However, audiobooks can be severely abridged, which to me is enough to consider them as being a different work and so not eligible to be combined with the print works.
Anyone else have any thoughts on this?
First off, great work, Tim--I love the new features.
To throw in my 2c regarding the translations issue--I support separating Greek Homer and English Homer but combining other translations / originals--and I don't think it's principally a classic vs. contemporary language/work issue. It's a question of usage, and usage isn't principally determined by chronology.
For example, I own both Latin and English versions of Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana the Summa, and various other works of medieval philosophy/theology, and I view them as the same. Why? The vast majority of people reading such works, whether in Latin or in translation, are reading them for their philosophy/theological content... the Odyssey, on the other hand, is read for cultural/linguistic content. There is a social difference that goes beyond "I read Greek / Latin and you don't, so nyah!"
Does anyone agree with me on the Augustine/Aquinas point, or is usage so individual as to make this impossible to define?
Another issue (actually, another kettle of worms)--some 'translations' are so different as to no longer be the same work.
For example, Heaney's Burial at Thebes is a distinct work from other English translations of Antigone. That case is rather easily detectable, but others are more hidden. For instance, Stephen Mitchell's works are less 'translations' than 'reinterpretations.' Personally, I would view Mitchell's Tao te Ching as distinct from an accurate translation--but perhaps that's just me being fussy, and something it's impossible to establish a rule for...
(that was rather a long comment, wasn't it?)
I'm LOST, here. I feel as though I dropped into a convention of librarians. I thought this was a social site for book lovers, not edition technicians. I get the concept of combining works when the title varies slightly (Moby Dick/Moby Dick or The White Whale), or the author's name sometimes, but not always, includes a middle name (Patricia Cornwell/Patricia Daniels Cornwell). But I'm confused about how all these decisions on which works should be combined (translations--yes or no?; annotated editions--yes or no?) will affect simple me, who is just using this site to keep track of what I own, and to browse among like-minded bookaholics for gems I might have missed. Am I even going to NOTICE how this works? Presumably it won't change anything I enter in my own catalog?
Re: Mitchell's translation. I think that's something that's a good example for handling things case-by-case. Sure Mitchell's translation is... iffy, but in the case of the Tao Te Ching there is a whole class of somewhat adventurous translations that go pretty far afield at times (Le Guin calls hers a "version", for instance). Now, should I try to divide out the more literal and less literal translations? That sounds like a losing battle to me.
anonymous,
No combinations/separations will affect what you see when you look at your own catalog; a book won't turn into another just because they were combined.
What it might affect, and one of the reasons I'm interested (the other being just general enjoyment of quibbling over details) is finding your like-minded booklovers.
Let's consider _The Annotated Wizard of Oz_, a sister volume to the previously mentioned _Annotated Alice_; it's less common, though, so it would be lost in the noise if it were combined with the un-annotated edition (which it was until a second ago, when I separated it at least long enough to do this exercise. People who disagree can feel free to re-combine them.) I own this, and bought it for the annotations. The "recommended books" for the annotated edition include _Annotated Alice_ (good catch there) and several literary fantasy novels (such as Gene Wolfe's _Urth of the New Sun_, not a children's book by any stretch). The "recommended books" for the original _Wizard of Oz_ consist exclusively of children's books (though to be fair, 4/10 recommendations for the Annotated edition are also children's books -- they aren't non-overlapping sets). My personal opinion is to err on the side of separation; seemingly subtle differences between editions may translate into different uses, and thus different communities of people who own the book in question.
Thanks, Lorax. A lucid and helpful response.
language -- I certainly did not intend to "tell other people how they read the Odyssey." I was simply offering my opinion; clearly it differs from your own. I certainly understand your well-made point.
I withdraw from the conversation, which is clearly more heated than I had assumed. I offer my deepest apologies if I have offended you or anyone else.
Latest thought: the fun stats page tells me that I have 967 books and 952 works. I'd really like a link I can click on that would show me the 15 'duplicate' works so that I can separate them if needs be (as I suspect will be the case). Going through every book in my catalogue one by one to find them would just take too long!
There's a pretty big difference between Aquinas and Homer in their originals, and Dick Francis in Swedish, Eric Carle in German, or Terry Pratchett in Italian, though.
hi language: for some people there can be more significant differences between translations and original-language texts. For instance, I own a copy of Jean Hyppolite's French translation of Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes. For me (since my English and my German are both better than my French) that translation isn't of interest because it helps me understand Hegel; it's mainly of interest because I care about the history of Hegel-interpretation in the twentieth century, and that translation was hugely influential in the 20th-century reception and interpretation of Hegel by French philosophers. For my purposes, anyway, knowing that another user had a copy of that book as opposed to (or in addition to) copies of the German original or an English translation would provide real information.
But I have no idea how to implement a system that would do justice to those more idiosyncratic differences without also obscuring the simultaneous commonality (i.e., without depriving the French-speaking user who wants to hook up with other readers of Hegel of information that would be useful to him or her). The only way to do it, I think, would be to let a user "opt-out" of a combination, so that a user's recommendations and overlaps would be generated on the basis of collective LibraryThing "Work" data except where, for a particular book, a user had chosen to reject a more widely accepted combination (for his or her purposes alone). IANAP, but that sounds staggeringly complicated.
Had a look at Asimov's page of works after greyhead mentioned the size of it in one of the comments. I've noticed some erroneous combines in there, but haven't separated them because I suspect they'd just get combined again. Specifically, 'Nightfall', the novel has been combined with 'Nightfall', the short story collection and with 'Nightfall One', the first volume of the two-volume short-story collection.
This is an example of why I think there should be measures in place to prevent the combining of certain books if necessary, as the above is an example of two very distinct works being mistakenly combined.
Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Too many connections in /storage/www/librarything.com/data/work_combineworks_submit.php on line 11
- fatal error (1)
Argh! Now I may as well log off and go wash the dishes! (;
Can anybody can help me with my Georgian dictionary?
I can! Give me enough to go on (a decent transliteration) and I'll give you the actual Georgian script.
Wow thanks! I'd copy it from the cover but I didn't think I'd need it in Guatemala and left it at a friend's place (-:
Title: Title K'art'uli-inglisuri lek'sikoni : 4700 sitqva
Author: Author T'amar T'oraze
Publication: Publication T'bilisi: Gamomc'emloba "Mnat'obi", 1994.
It was actually in the Library of Congress but the transliteration had some odd characters which I changed to apostrophes. You can see the card here: http://www.librarything.com/card_card.php?work=622893&book=11174
Thanks again and now back the regular heated debate...
Thanks, language. Well said.
Let me add: Miscommunication and ratcheting are a common online phenomenon—the fault of the medium more than the participants.
Again, I want to circle everything back to the issue. LibraryThing is NOT attempting to create the final, perfect, structured representation of library data.
It is my belief that no structure could be perfect. Even so, LibraryThing is not trying to get there. Instead, LibraryThing is asking a simpler question: How should LibraryThing work?
Here are the ways in which book-combinations matter:
• Book combinations affect the little number under the blue "people" icon—the number of other people who own your book.
• Book combinations affect the composition and order of the "connections" box on your profile—the people who share books with you, and how many they share.
• Book combinations change the "social data page" (the page you get to when you click on the blue people icon). Thus, they change where your ratings and reviews show up. Obviously, they never change your ratings or reviews. I can, incidentally, add the edition to reviews, so that people can know what translation you're reviewing or etc. I will also add a "deeper" social page, that gives information for the very specific edition you have.
• Book combinations are used in calculating recommended books. Thus, if two editions of Tom Sawyer are combined, the system has more data to chew on when calculating "people who own X also own Y." This helps both on the X and the Y. Certain books—like Tom Sawyer—never got suggested because they were "split" among so many different editions and versions.
• Book combinations affect global statistics. Which Potter is owned by the most people. That depends on how you combine the editions!
• Discussion. LibraryThing will shortly be adding discussion forums, which will be tied back to works, authors, tags and so forth. Special boxes on books, authors and profiles will alert people to relevant discussions. Combining books will allow people who own "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" to know when there's a discussiong going on about "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone."
Finally, in addition to the best way it should work, there is also the question of the easiest way. Not only is there no perfect system, but each step toward perfection also involves a step toward complexity. There is a reason that—as my librarian friend tells me—catalogers are the highest paid specialty--it's hard work! In aiming for perfection, we must remember that LibraryThing is something done for fun, by people who enjoy it.
I think the best way to think about things is to remember the "social" aspect. For that, I favor the "cocktail party test."
You're at a cocktail party (insert "church social," "kegger," "orgy," as you like) with some people you don't know very well, but all of whom speak English. You're over by the bookshelf. Someone then pulls out a book and says, "Oh, I just read this!" and turns to you and says "Did you read this? What did you think about it?" If you answer in the affirmative, the person then asks "I love this book so much, and you've read it too, what else do you think I should read?"
So, marching through some options:
Someone pulls out the Signet edition of "The Crucible." I think you say "Yes" and "I thought it was great!" no matter what edition you've read. And you suggest "Death of a Salesman." I think you say this even if you heard the audiobook. So, all editions and media should be combined.
Someone pulls out Nabokov's screenplay for "Lolita." I think you say "No, I've never read that, but I read the novel." So, the screenplay and the novel (which are quite different) should not be combined, but maybe Tim should add a field for "related books."
Someone pulls out the Finnish translation of Azimov's "Caves of Steel"? *I* think that you base your answer on whether or not you've read the English version. After all, this is an English-language cocktail party. The person is not asking if you know Finnish and have read this book in Finnish.
I think the same goes if they pull out Lattimore's translation of Homer. You'd answer yes no matter what edition you read. If the person wanted reading suggestions, you'd suggest they read the Aeneid, or Apollonius of Rhodes. Maybe, you'd even suggest the person read the Cliff's Notes, because they were so helpful to you.
But, if someone pulls out a copy of Homer in the original Greek, I think you base your answer on whether you've read Homer in Greek, not whether you've ever read Homer.
I can't *quite* explain this, but I feel a social difference. Finnish books by Azimov in LibraryThing are mostly the property of Finns who like science fiction, and read some in English and some not. That their copy of "Caves of Steel" is in Finnish is largely incidental; it does not read better in the original Finnish! Ancient Greek books in LibraryThing—and there are MANY—are owned by people who care more substantially about the language. When someone whips out a copy of Homer in Greek, you don't say you've read it if you've only read Homer in English.
Again, let's look at the results:
The end result of combining the Finnish and English Caves of Steel would be to give the Finnish owner good suggestions about what books to read. (There is so little Finnish stuff in LibraryThing that without combination the suggestions would be bad indeed!)
The end result of combining the Greek and English Homer would be to utterly submerge the Greek. Suggestions would almost entirely based on the English edition. The Iliad and Odyssey are very widely-held books, and a staple of high-school reading, like The Crucible and Beloved. But people who own Greek editions of Homer tend rather to own academic books on epic, oral poetry and so forth. Combining these books would not help anyone.
Incidentally, I am not being a snob about this. This rule applies in any similar case. Dante? Rumi? The Koran? Fine by me.
Lastly, I think much of this goes away if I add a "related books" field? Do people agree?
A "related titles" field would be a great asset.
On a different note, I seem to be having persistent problems with javascript when it comes to the new features and my browser. I'm not sure what could be causing the problem.
Maybe the decision-point should be:
• Combine the work and its translations if the original work is in English.
• Do not combine the work and the translations if the original work is not in English.
That may not be perfect, but at least it's not subject to different opinions.
Again, let me remind people that LibraryThing is an English-language site. I may well create other language versions of it—if you want to help me with that, send me an email.
On annotated editions:
The case seems clear for works that have "annotated" in their titles, but what about the edition of Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) by Gabriel García Márquez that I dearly want. It's published by Ediciones Catedra S.A., has no special title here or on Amazon but the cover says "Edición de Jacques Joset" (ISBN 843760494X). It's about as heavily annotated as the Annotated Alice I've seen, and is revised so often that even Amazon can't keep up (They list the 6th edition, 1995; The current one is the 17th, 2005).
Now because the title does not differ it is no mean feat to separate it out on LT, and people here do have it.
In an ideal world I would be able to see who has any edition of this annotated version, and even which edition they have - but the ISBN doesn't change for new revisions!
So since this is not yet an ideal world, I'm more than happy to just go with Tim's wishes for now - combine the lot - and discuss "ideal world" features here or on the Google group for the future when more important features and fixes are out of the way.
On translations:
Tim seems to be mainly thinking that there are 2 categories:
a) Books originally in English translated into other modern languages
b) Books originally in an ancient language translated into modern English
But what about
c) Books originally in another modern language, translated into English or another modern language (Eco, García Márquez, Murakami, Calvio, etc...)
and even the rare
d) Books originally in English or another modern language translated into an ancient or constructed language (Cattus petasatus, Winnie ille Pu, Latin and Ancient Greek Harry Potter, stuff in Esperanto or Klingon)
It seems pretty clear that most of (d) is special and therefore shouldn't be combined. (c) is much murkier - it's special to me and others who have them because they're in assorted languages, but to others they're not special because those people have them in their own language which they read better than English.
Again, whatever Tim says for now, and I'm gonna keep on wishing for one far-off day!
"I just think the idea that the master title (the one the book is filed under) should be Братья Карамазовы rather than The Brothers Karamazov is ridiculous"
Hum. A standard cataloguing method is to have something like "[Братья Карамазовы] The brothers Karamazov"; "[I sommersi ei salvati] The drowned and the saved". "[Original title] Title".
Would it be possible to have a system whereby the most common name is partly decoupled from the one used for the title of the work? This could be done by... hmm.
Say you have your title. This is generated from the most common edition of the work, which is fine. But allow a secondary title field, which can be edited by the more restricted user-group which was muttered about upthread (or, hey, by everyone)... and stick the contents of this after it, in square brackets.
"The brothers Karamazov [Братья Карамазовы. (Another title)]
This covers both foreign-language cases, like the two above, and "multiple title" ones; so we would also have someone able to append "[Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone]" or "[...and the philosopher's stone]" to the relevant (contentious) book. It'd also allow for clarifying notes -
"Nightfall [short story collection]" and "Nightfall [novel]" would be easily distinguishable, and prevent miscombination. Possibly you'd need to add a limit to this field, to prevent someone listing every local title for a wildly popular novel translated in to fifty languages...
Thoughts? Are there major technical issues why this wouldn't work, or is it flawed for entirely different reasons?
Is it really slow right now, or is my wireless on the fritz again? Anyone?
Dear Tim;
Monday Feb. 20, and Tuesday Feb. 21, 2006 I have encountered a new problem:
I search for, and find "Fostering Sustainable Behavior : An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing" by McKenzie-Mohr, Doug with Amazon.com. LibraryThing accepts it and adds it to http://www.librarything.com/addbooks.php "Recently added".
I click on the pencil to edit the book (add TAGS, and add comment, and enter my LoC call number.)
The next screen is a blank white screen with the words "This author does not appear to exist."
I've tried work-arounds (going to my catalog, etc.) and I get the same error message. I have entered 2,292 books and have not encountered this error before.
Same problem with "Land-grant universities and extension into the 21st century : renegotiating or a ..." by George R. McDowell .
I have deleted the above two books from Library Thing, until I can get them entered and edited for my database.
Also, after editing a book and clicking on the summit button when LibraryThing returns to the "add books" page (http://www.librarything.com/addbooks.php) then the header for Library Thing now appears twice on the page, one below the other. The frame below the header, now displays the header again.
In the edit page (http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?book=1988841&mode=edit&referpage=addbooks.php) I can not make the "Other fields" go away. The other fields are now displayed, and clicking on them does not make them go away.
I use Netscape 7.2 Mozilla/5.0 (WindowsXP; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (ax)
Finally, when LibraryThing went off line (in that state, it does not let one signout). I did not get back for 24 hours, I was still logged in. Maybe after XX minutes of inactivity one should automatically be logged off?
---michtelassn
In the vein of "this author doesn't exist", Spinoza seems to only exist as far as combining is concerned, and no where else - you can't view his actual author page, as he "doesn't exist"
I'm pleased to see that editions can now be hidden to make the 'works' page a little tidier. However, I think I'd prefer it if the default is that everything is visible and you click to hide something, rather than the current everything being hidden and you click to show something. This is because when I'm auditing an author, the first thing I do is to check that all the current combinations are correct and then separate as required before I do any combining.
A 'show all/hide all' button would also be useful.
Oops, might have been me who accidentally combined Nightfall. Sorry about that, I *have* read both the collection and the novel. A field akin to "work type" (novel, story collection, audio book, etc), would be nice for these instances.
I happen to be in the "more is better" crowd with these combining things simply because it makes more sense recommendation-wise.
As for recommendations, we could have a field where users could select which books/authors they recommend if you like a particular book. I don't know if this really is a good system, since I might be tempted to cross-reference the science fiction grand masters.
And Tim is spot on about his example on Caves of Steel. I just entered my first manual books yesterday (author name starting with A, so Asimov's books went in).
BTW, what should I do with my Strugatski brothers' books? I can only find Arkadi with the author search, but they wrote some very interesting books together. I can't really say that Arkadi or Boris was the "more important" writer for "A milliard let do kontsa sveta" or "Piknik na obochine", for instance.
Has anyone had a look at Tom Clancy's page, by the way? Yikes. I tried some combining but after a while started seeing things...but this page is an excellent example of where combining is useful.
BTW2: would it be useful to have some quidelines (suggestions) for naming books like Clancy's? Or a comment about the use of articles? There are lots of cases where we have two books, the difference is that the other has the article at the end.
As for this whole "what should be combined" thing. My suggestion: first concentrate on what's important about the whole feature. Make a "rule-set" (if you like to call it that) for it. Then add the exceptions. Now it seems like more emphasis is put on exceptions so that the main idea is somewhat lost.
I think the main things are:
- to see who has books similar to mine and
- to get better recommendations.
Exactly like Tim said. Consider yourself looking at someone else's bookshelf. What is important in that situation?
I'd also be interested to see what different kinds of editions (includes translations) exist of a book, but I suspect I'm in the minority here.
I'm a LibraryThing newbie, so please bear with me...
I just added some books to my LibraryThing for the first time, and I ended up with quite a lot of duplicates, and I'm wondering what I did wrong.
Here's what I did:
1) Went to my Amazon account page
2) Selected "View by Item" for "all items ordered"
3) Saved the resulting HTML page describing my complete order history to a local file
4) Went to Import
5) Uploaded my Amazon order history file
This resulted in a bunch of books added to my catalog, and that's pretty cool. But why are some books duplicated in my catalog? I can't explain that.
For example, the first book listed in my catalog is Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. There are two identical entries (same ISBN) for that book in my catalog now. But the book was only listed once in my order history -- I've only bought it once.
But the next book in my catalog, 101st Airborne: The Screaming Eagles at Normandy, is only listed once, which is correct -- I've only bought it once.
I'm confused, and now I have a bunch of duplicates to deal with, or maybe I should delete the whole batch and start over because I did something wrong?
Thanks. Great site! I paid my $25 before even trying it, I like the idea and the community here so much already.
Can someone take a look at similarly tagged. I think the combinations stuff has made it less than useful.
See http://www.librarything.com/catalog/5794 which is the entry for "Good Omens". We have 15 books tagged similarly to "Good Omens" and they are all "Good Omens"
Fjalrg: probably the Amazon page had the same ISBN's more than once. Seems like the import picks every ISBN it can find and doesn't care about duplicates. You can just as well do the import again and it will import the same books again.
Had this happen with my own text file.
< aside >
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."
Albert Einstein
;-)
< /aside >
Had a look at Asimov's page of works after greyhead mentioned the size of it in one of the comments. I've noticed some erroneous combines in there, but haven't separated them because I suspect they'd just get combined again. Specifically, 'Nightfall', the novel has been combined with 'Nightfall', the short story collection and with 'Nightfall One', the first volume of the two-volume short-story collection.
This is an example of why I think there should be measures in place to prevent the combining of certain books if necessary, as the above is an example of two very distinct works being mistakenly combined.
Guilty as charged. I didn't spot those distinctions. Actually it's quite hard to be sure that some works are distinct - even tracking back to the works may not give you the same information.
I notice that the new 'message box' combination is much simpler to use but is also open to more errors - on a long page it's all to easy to select an extra work by error and have it swept in to the compilation. The intermediate version that showed you the titles to be combined was a little safer.
Bob
I don't like the change to omit the list of editions. Seeing the additions can give a clue as to why works have not been combined, and its not good for separation.
Could we have a show all editions option at the top of the page so I don't have to open the editions on each work separately, and after each refresh.
A thought on separation. Sometimes I find that I wish to split the editions in a work. Say there are 8 editions and I consider 5 to be one work and 3 another. it would be nice to select the 3 and then select separate. This would be particually useful for undoing combinations I have got wrong!
One odd effect of the change is that yesterday I could combine but not separate, today I can separate but not combine. (I get "you must select at least 2 works ..." even when I have selected three or more)
This may be because I have a very old version of IE, it is being upgraded on monday, so if no one else is having problems I'll see if that helps.
fjarlq, the import function has never worked properly for me and I'm just uploading simple lists of ISBNs. I get duplicates everytime I upload a list and have to review my new additions and delete the extra copies. I've found the most helpful way to use the import function is to upload in small batches (20-40 books at a time). I get fewer duplicates this way. The few times I used the import function I uploaded lists of several hundred ISBNs at a time and got 2-4 duplicates per ISBNs. Smaller lists of ISBNs have less of a problem with duplication.
I've just run into a problem combining books. I attempted to combine Bookbinding & Care of Books, by Douglas Cockerell, with
Bookbinding and the Care of Books: a Handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians (the same book). I carefully checked both boxes, but received an error message "You must select at least two works to combine them". But I did select two works.
I'm also adding my voice to those who would like to have the default on the combine/separate page to be having the editions showing.
For my computer [ OS 9.1 / IE 5.0 ] on the works page the editions link isn't working properly. When I click on it I'm given the message : Loading... and then nothing happens. Then after using 'go to work' and deciding that two entries should be combined, I'm told that I must select two works!
Seems to be a common problem.
Just had the chance to try combining books with the new system - my work computer (Win98, IEsomething) can't combine - and I'd like to add my voice to those who are unhappy with the fact that it now misses out the step where it showed you the page of selected works and what the single title for all of them would be combined. I found this page to be very useful as an "are you sure?" step in combining, and it gave me the chance to look carefully to make sure I hadn't accidentally clicked on the wrong book anywhere. It may make combining take slightly longer, but it also makes it much safer, so could we have it back, please?
I'm afraid that I probably won't be doing much (if any) combining and separating of books until you take action on some of the earlier suggestions - I'm not at all comfortable with having the editions hidden by default, and unhiding them all individually every time I make a change isn't the best use of my time. I'd prefer to have them *visible* by default; but failing that, a 'show all' button would suffice.
A thought on separation. Sometimes I find that I wish to split the editions in a work. Say there are 8 editions and I consider 5 to be one work and 3 another. it would be nice to select the 3 and then select separate. This would be particually useful for undoing combinations I have got wrong!
I have also thought about this. I wouldn't be to hard to do with Javascript. Look at Wikipedia's history pages for some ideas.
One way would be for when two or more books are separated from a work but not refreshed, for a "combine" button to appear.
Another way would be to have a radio button or tick box next to each book and a "combine these books into a separate work" button.
But with some thought maybe a nice way to separate several books from one work directly into another work would be possible.
Does anybody know of ways to do drag and drop on web pages with Javascript? This would be very useful. We could have something like moving files between folders in a GUI OS, control-click several books from wherever, then drag the whole lot into a work, or right-click and select "move to seperate work".
Finally, when LibraryThing went off line (in that state, it does not let one signout). I did not get back for 24 hours, I was still logged in. Maybe after XX minutes of inactivity one should automatically be logged off?
Huh? Why would you want to be logged off? I hate sites that automatically log me off; when I come back to LibraryThing (or MetaFilter or whatever), I want to go right into the flow, not have to log back in.
I definitely want to be automatically logged out of every site, or at least given the option. This is because currently and for the next three months minimum I will be doing all of my internet at a range of cybercafes throughout Mexico and Central America. I don't really want other people accidentally fiddling with my data.
All e-mail services provide this.
Oh what a tangled thread we weave *grin*---may I change the subject slightly and just say how much I LOVE that we can now grab covers from other users? I've found several I didn't have before and it's shortened the search process considerably, as I'm one of those "do it from scratch" types who prefers to enter most of my books manually rather than using the "search Amazon" feature. From reading some of these posts, it seems I'm saving myself some aggravation, even if it is a bit time-consuming. I found myself editing most of the entries for books I did import from Amazon anyway, so I gave it up.
WOW!
I thought the change was completely positive--faster, easier, less clutter. I HATE those intermediate screens! After making the change I happily toodled around making lots of edits, which I would have found too combersome to do the other way. De gustibus, I guess.
The JavaScript bug was unexpected too and, at the moment, not something I want to muck around with, particularly in light of all the negativity about the solution itself. So I've restored the old way.
I wonder if the new way has ANY defenders besides me--Firefox users, perhaps?
Other notes:
When I log someone in, I have the option of setting their "cookie" for any length of time I want. I could set it for two minutes, like PayPal or a bank. Or I could set it for a long time, like a lower-pressure ap. I set it for a a very long time. Or, like email clients, I could have a little interface—eg., a button—allowing the users to designate how long. (These buttons are often labeled "public computer" or, reversing the notion, "keep me logged in.")
I did it with a long-acting cookie, and no option:
My theory is that:
(1) logging in and out is an irritation
(2) book-cataloging is mosty an in-home activity, where there's less of a risk of some stranger mucking around
(3) book-cataloging is a low-risk activity, as opposed to banking
(4) There is a sign-out button on every page
I recognize that opinions may differ—and one user is jumping around cybercafees in S. America—but I don't think I'm going to change my mind on this one. 90% solutions are better than 100% solutions. In this case, the 100% solution—having a button allowing user control over log-in time—would complicate and clutter things for everyone.
But where's the love? Did you see the Georgian up there ^ ?
Ooops! I meant to thank you but I had lots of coffee this morning and usually have none so I'm racing about a bunch of windows with my brain in overdrive!
Muchísimas gracias!
Sehr viehlen dank!
Thanks so much!
I fixed the Tom Clancy bug.
When I log someone in, I have the option of setting their "cookie" for any length of time I want. I could set it for two minutes, like PayPal or a bank. Or I could set it for a long time, like a lower-pressure ap. I set it for a a very long time. Or, like email clients, I could have a little interface—eg., a button—allowing the users to designate how long. (These buttons are often labeled "public computer" or, reversing the notion, "keep me logged in.")
Out of interest, what is the "very long time?" I often end up on the same internet cafe computer as the previous day and I'm still logged in. Wouldn't 12 hours or 18 hours be a good middle ground? Over 24 hours I don't see the point in bothering to expire it at all.
That said, I don't really think anybody's going to come in and vandalize my LT data (-:
P.S. South America is Colombia on down, so I still 7 whole countries before I get there - if I ever do.
Sorry, Hippietrail, I can't keep track of where you are at any point...
"Out of interest, what is the 'very long time?'"
I think it expires in 2036.
I just don't think people should have to sign in more than once...
I wonder if the new way has ANY defenders besides me--Firefox users, perhaps?
I quite like it. (I use Netscape.) I am chugging along combining anyway, whatever the interface looks like. I try to look at every combination I've made before I leave an author page, and AFAIK I've caught any errant edition combinations that were my fault (and a few that weren't, thanks to the way LT was automatically dealing with titles with colons in). Separating out ": Vol I" and ": Vol 2" from apparently ok combined works is taking longer than combining others, but is definitely worth the effort!
It must be my subbing side, but I find this really fascinating work! Am I officially sad?
Oh, and I'd be livid if I were logged out every 12 hours or so. My 'working day' can be anything up to 18 hours long, and I really don't want to be logging on every single morning or midway through the evening. Leaving a window open and logged in through the week so that I can drop in whenever I like suits me and how I want to use LT (not least because that way I can come home with a new bag of books and catalogue them straight away).
Well, fair warning, I think the current page is too fussy and I dislike the intermediate pages. Next time I have time, I'm going to revert back to the "new" design, with the following changes;
•It will work on all browsers
•There will be a "show all editions" link
I think I'm going to choose a minimalist approach to the "incorrect combinations/separations problem." It's very hard to set up rules like "don't allow user to combine X with Y." X and Y are in motion. A works' id number may one day be 231, but then after a rush of new entries, combinations and separations, it's 451. As stated many times, LibraryThing has no "rock" to sit on—just a whole lot of ratty, unreliable data that it must make sense of.
So, building "locks" into the system is hard. "Partial locks" (eg., that worked on the editions already in the system, but balked when someone added some Heinlein from the Scottish National Catalog) would irritate more than it helped.
So I'm going to allow users to add warning comments to authors. Users—probably users with over 100 books or paid accounts—can add one. If there's a warning comment, you will have to go down and click a checkbox to say that you've read it.
What do people thing?
Or think, even.
I type "thing" too many times a day..
Yes, language, there should be a way. The point of the current system is not to allow strange combinations, but only ones that the system thinks makes sense. But I agree this has drawbacks.
Yes, yes, yes.....leave us logged in unless we choose to log out. Please. Nobody uses my computer but me, and I notice some sites (notably my e-mail service) have started "expiring" me in media res.....I hate it. People who are using internet cafe's should be personally responsible to log themselves off whatever sites they're using, just as a matter of course.
I have two accounts. One is a private account for my hospice volunteer work, while the second is a public account for my personal book collection.
I'm quite accustomed to manually signing out: when I'm at home (to jump from one account to the other) and when away from home (i.e. cataloguing hospice books on a shared computer at Hospice).
FWIW, I'm very happy with the way Tim has it set up. It couldn't be more convenient.
P.S. Love the Georgian script!
OK, why can't I combine my Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii with the other variants listed here? There's got to be a way to let the user find appropriate names that the system doesn't come up with on its own.
Because there are so many ways to romanize Russian and looking for them is not one of the ways LT currently looks for possible same authors. Arabic is even worse. I'm glad Qadaffi isn't a prolific novelist!
I think a nice way to do it would be as part of the author search. In the results screen there could be a tickbox next to each result and a combine button.
I don't know whether it would be worth having a way to show users that certain names already are combined. You could show the "combined name" next to each result but in my experience there can be two user IDs which look the same on screen. "García Márquez, Gabriel" & "Márquez, Gabriel García" for instance if both existed and weren't already combined would still show up as "Gabriel García Márquez" and thus be of no help...
P.S. I'm combining the Dostoevskys for you (-:
Okay, I made one really good change--apologies for the horn-tooting. Now when you click to combine or separate, the confirmation page comes up with the "Combine" or "Separate" buttons already selected ("focused"). Thus, you can just hit return again, and not have to move your mouse to the button to click it.
This makes me happier than a clam, let me tell you.
I think the answer is a search-box on the author pages. The resulting search page will have Hippietrail's checkboxes, and indications of what authors have been already combined and what haven't.
In mediis rebus, actually. In medias res is more "into the middle of things." A novel can start in medias res. But if you are in a pool of crocodiles, you are in mediis rebus.
No, I'm not flaming. I just have so little opportunity to fell good about all the time I wasted on this stuff.
Of course, what I want to is to be able to specify that some publication contains multiple works. So that the ISBN of a book and be linked to two works. Think of the classic science fiction "Ace Doubles" - 2 completely unconnected work in 1 paperback volume.
Of course, this changes the logical design completely, since the relationship of work to manifestation changes from parent:child to many:many.
Tim,
couple of thoughts on the 'clutter' and the changes. I think central to my thinking her is that the, shall we say, detailed layout of the old/current page is only clutter *when I am 100% happy with the works that have been combined*. When I'm looking at an author's combine/separate works page for the first time, it's valuable information, as the first thing I do is look for thing such as where vol. 1, 2 and 3 of a book have all been combined together and need to be separated. Once I've done this and am happy with the new combinations, *then* it is clutter and I'd like to hide it.
I hope this gives you some understanding for my point of view - I don't want you to think that I'm arguing against the new changes for the sake of it and to be just plain ornery. :) I do appreciate all your efforts, and as long as the new page (a) has a 'show all' button, and (b) works :), then I think that will work just fine for me. Thinking ahead, would it be possible for the page to remember what's been shown/hidden after each time a separate/combine change has been made? Otherwise I fear I see myself using 'show all' and then hiding each work I'm happy with after every time I've made a change.
I'll be happy with the 'warning comments' solution if implementing locks is going to be tricky. Though depending on how it works out in reality, maybe in the longer term you could consider locks again?
No, I understand your point too. I think it needs to be an option either way. Sometimes seeing everything is critical, sometimes it just gets in the way. My gut feeling is that although showing everything might lead to fewer mistakes, showing just the works would lead to more actual work being done, with more correct ones too.
Let's think about locks from the perspective of the user interface, and consider the database issues to be solvable. How would a lock be established? What would be the target of the lock, the edition or the work?
I guess I could lock things "in" pretty easily. Imagine a link for "lock," next to "separate."
What's harder is to prevent combinations. After all, even if X and Y should never be combined, there are going to be Qs, Zs and Ws that need to be combined into X and Y. I can't do a general "combine lock." Doing a "never combine X with Y" lock would be a yucky UI, and wouldn't prevent some other spelling of X being combined with Y.
Do you see the problem? Is a "no-separation lock" good enough?
T
It's going to be fun making the smallest-ever padlock icon...
It's going to be fun making the smallest-ever padlock icon...
Tim, you have your work cut out for you:
http://tinyurl.com/qyzyz
By the way, is this the Longest Thread Ever?
chamekke, doing her bit
P.S. I'm combining the Dostoevskys for you (-:
OK done. There's now 860 works, and the variations of his name takes up 5 lines in my browser. Let me know if I missed any.
Now quick and combine them all!
Nice icon, but I always liked square-bottomed ones, with ridges.
I know, it seems I have no real care for graphic design. But some of my other websites (eg., http://www.librarything.com/dragons or http://www.ancientlibrary.com/smith-bio/0458.html) have rather carefully-planned designs.
I wish I had the time to design LibraryThing right.
I understand everything you say about the locks, and I think I mentioned somewhere in one of my much earlier comments about how I could see 'locking' things from being combined would be tricky.
If a 'no-separation' lock would be do-able, that would be great. The user-specified comments should (hopefully) be enough for the works which shouldn't be combined.
Actually, just had a thought. Would it be possible to 'watch' authors and have the system mail an alert if something has changed? That way if I'm 100% certain I've got an author's works combined just right, and I get an alert saying someone's made a change, I can have a look to see if it's something that might need undoing, rather than having to remember to check the page every so often.
I need to get the changelog working fully. (Right now it doesn't log everything that's going on, just the target work and the user.) Once that's up, then people could subscribe/watch particular authors or works.
One way to reduce the lock problem due to incoming works from many sources not quite fitting what the locks are supposed to block might be:
In "add books", always first check the million and a half books already here. Then give the user the choice of those editions. If it ain't there then let them go to the many outside sources.
(I think it's a good idea quite apart from the lock problem of course)
When I separate books, I am bounced back to the home page. This is a bit of a pain when I am trying to combine/separate a prolific author's books!
Tim,
Thanks for your explanation of the translation thing; I can see where you're coming from now, and I'd been using the "find it on someone's shelves" criterion in my head and getting different results. I agree that an intermediate degree of relatedness would solve most of these problems, but you've convinced me that wider combinations may be the way to go; while the various English translations of Dante may not be the same thing, or the same as the Italian original, they're still more like each other than they are like, say, _The Joy of Cooking_, and with a binary same/different status combining them may be the preferred option after all.
Incidentally, has anyone tackled the issue of combining the myriad editions of the single most common book in translation into English (the Bible, of course)? It's complicated since most people have it listed without an author, and with varying titles (often reflecting which translation they have), so I wouldn't even know where to begin.
Hippietrail. If you add a book (defined as title/author) that's already in the system, it gets combined automatically. If you add one that's not, it uses the same "guessing" as it used to do, usually combining it with an existing book. Don't worry, most books find their home okay.
Lilithcat: You're bounced back to the index page?! Is anyone else getting this one? Can you tell me what browser you're using? The system uses the referrer attribute of the request, so unless you're using some hard-core anonymizer, I can't explain it. Maybe if you have your security settings really high?
Oh, and don't even talk to me about the Bible. Classical authors are hard enough.
The Bible is actually a tough one. I'm sure LibraryThing has a few KJV enthusiasts who wouldn't want to be "connected" to any of those RSV sissies.
When I go to "change book cover" on The Farthest-Away Mountain by Lynne Reid Banks I get the following error:
Warning: extract() [function.extract]: First argument should be an array in /storage/www/librarything.com/data/addcover.php on line 133
Change cover:
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_ISBN <> '' GROUP BY books_ISBN ORDER BY count DESC' at line 5
Additionally, when I tried to add this title to my catalog from the Book Information page, I got the message "no such book"
Can you tell me what browser you're using? . . .Maybe if you have your security settings really high?
It's Internet Explorer on a PC(not sure which version - this is my work computer - so it might be security settings). I'll try on my home computer tonight and see what happens.
The system uses the referrer attribute of the request, so unless you're using some hard-core anonymizer, I can't explain it.
If you say so. I don't know what any of that means, but then, I don't need to!
As to the Bible, I wouldn't even try. I have a hard enough time getting some people to understand that the Hebrew Bible is not the same as the Catholic Bible which is not the same as the Protestant Bible ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Ms. Anki,
Hey. Thanks for the note. I couldn't reproduce the problem, either on my own or signing in as you. It's possible it was a temporary thing, or it's possible you did it again and that fixed it. (I'm thinking it's because the book didn't manage to get registered as a "work.") If you have this problem again, or you just want to pursue this, let me know a bit more about the situation. Did it work for you in the end? Did you play with combining or separating the work? Did it have a cover before it broke, etc.
Thanks!
Tim
I agree with you if you mean that the Hebrew Bible is not the same thing as the "whole" Catholic Bible.
But I'm not so certain that we need to split hairs on different versions otherwise. Christian Bibles are substantially the same, more so than most other editions and translations, and LibraryThing combines both. The places they differ are also the least significant parts. Anyone who doesn't want to be connected to me because my Bible has Tobit--well, I don't want to be connected to them either.
The counter-argument is that most educated people with a reasonable number of books have a Bible. Combining them doesn't tell anyone anything interesting or new. "Oh, you have a Bible too? Whopee!" Preserving different editions ("The Soccer Mom's Bible") is more important.
In the end, I don't even want to go here. I'm leaving the Bible as a mosh pit.
First, thanks for making such a useful tool.
It looks like you are using the concept of works to combine results in useful ways. Libraries have started to do this as well. A look at redlightgreen.org or FictionFinder will show implementations of this. The term we use, based on a report, now about 10 years old, is Functional Requirements for Bibliographical Records or FRBR. http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/frbr/ provides a basic introduction and links to additional resources. The final report of the IFLA Committee is very detailed, over-kill for most folks.
The library community looks at the work as an intellectual product. You seem to be taking a more social approach. Looking at it from the reader’s rather than the author’s view-point. That is an interesting method. We need to get you to speak at some library conferences. Are you lined-up for any?
I notice you now provide MARC records for some items. Any way for a library to contribute records?
For the record, I'm having the same bounce-back-to-sign-in-screen separating problem. I am also using IE (version 6-something) and am on a PC. This combining is far too addictive, incidentally.
Oh, dear. I tried to combine Emily Brontë with Emily Brontë (which surely has been done before, but then undone again for unknown reasons), but as a result I now only end up on
http://www.librarything.com/author/brontecharlotte (sic!), and that page only shows the message "This author does not appear to exist."
Okay, I changed the way the separating "snap back" works. Can someone tell me if it works now?
And was it breaking with the combine page too?
--
I fixed the Bronte problem. But there's still a "nasty surprise" in there. A possible combine that says it's Emily, but is really Charlotte.
The author combine system works mostly. I need to tweak it a bit along the lines of the edition-combine system.
As stated, this is all like trying to repair a boat while it's in motion.... :)
Tim -
To follow up on the separation issue, I am now at home (iMac OS 9.2/IE5), and all is fine. Whether it's the different system or your fix, I don't know.
Like Christophilus, I am finding this way too much fun! You have brought out the inner librarian in me, and I don't know whether to thank you or curse you!
Oh, yes, I do. Thanks, Tim!
So I'm going through deleting all the duplicates from my catalog (see my message above for more information), and I've noticed a strange problem when I click on the page number to move to the next page, after deleting the duplicates from the current page.
The first click doesn't do anything except make the contents of the web page flicker a bit, and shift a little to the left. Then if I click on the page number again, it actually brings up that page.
If I don't delete anything, then clicking on the page numbers changes the page immediately.
Hmm, and actually, if I only delete a few things, the page still changes immediately. But if I delete a lot of duplicates (over 10?) from the current page then I have to click twice to move to the next page.
Hmm, I think maybe I know what's going on. I see in the URL for the page number that it contains an offset number. If I delete enough books, does the offset number of the next page become invalid somehow? Just a hunch.
I'm using Firefox 1.5.0.1, by the way. Thanks.
Anyone interested in the translation vs. original and English vs. foreign language topic may wish to look at a suggestion I put on the LT Google group to let MARC handle the whole thing automatically (well, almost, maybe with a little help from Tim).
[I wonder if 170 comments on one post is a Blogger record.]
On changelog watching.
I would prefer a RSS feed (and a more traditional page for those that prefer that) showing changed works in my catalogue - as those are the ones I'm most interested in.
Something quite strange is going on here, I wonder if it's related to the new changes somehow; if I go to http://www.librarything.com/author/kanariyozaburo , it tells me that I own one book by that author. If I click on the number 1, it then shows the list of *nine* books I actually own. I'm most confused.
HoldenCarver
"tim, the FONT SIZE chosen for the 'similarly tagged' list on the social pages is too small. Can it be sized back up a notch or two? "
*** wow ***
Fixed already, great service Thanks!
For the record, Tim, I did like the new minimalism visually. I've been combining extremely prolific series, and I need the vertical space for titles. Also, when doing a search-in-page for "#60", with editions showing I have to scroll past all the matches within a work before finding the next work, which was tedious. I even made use of the "sort by copies" for a little while, since the "biggest" works tending to be the most popular implies that there will be other copies of them, with the titles rearranged.
A strange thing I've been noticing (though it suits my sense of whimsy) is that several of the combined Hardy Boys works have acquired their Norwegian name instead of their English, even though I'm pretty sure the English copies outnumber the Norwegian in every case.
Sorry, that's http://www.librarything.com/author/dixonfranklinw for those who don't know.
Glad to hear someone liked it!
About "The Hardy Boys" in Norwegian, I'll look into preventing that. It's happening because the system has a bias against Amazon titles. In those cases, the English titles are from Amazon, and the Norwegian title from a library (not surprisingly, as Amazon's Norwegian boys fiction section is thin).
Some would say this argues against library titles, or in favor of "voting" on work titles. I think it argues for me parsing the language field in the MARC record, and discriminating against it. Shouldn't be too hard. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Tim --
I sent an email about this, but just in case it gets lost in your already overloaded inbox, could you please check to see why I cannot enter more than 200 books? ($25 went thru Paypal).
Thanks once again for your hard work,
Laura :)
Another combination of works issue: works that are substantially expanded or revised regularly. I was looking at David Wallechinsky's works including several different books along the lines of "Summer Olympics 1996", "Summer Olympics - Athens 2004". I can see an argument for both sides here, both combination and separation, for social and technical reasons. Any thoughts?
copied to Google Groups too.
Any suggestions for multivolume works with different authors.
In particular, Science and Civilisation in China which has about 22 volumes. For example volume 4 has 3 parts each a separate book and each not necessarily by the same author. Someone has combined many of the volumes and parts together under just Science and Civilisation in China; I feel more inclined to treat them as individual volumes as most people buy the volume they need (agriculture, botany, or paper for example) and not own the rest of them. Opinions?
I have a theory (eh-hem!)
Here is my theory about translations.
A translation in which the only material presented in the translated work is the text of the original work is a "popular translation".
A translation which includes additional text to explain the translation (in the form of footnotes, introductions, etc) is an "academic translation".
In my opinion, popular translations should be combined, while academic translations should not.
I’ll admit that I’m not getting into the minutiae of all the cataloging issues being bandied about. I’ve been happy ever since you could upload your covers.
I have a problem I’d like to point out though. Don’t know where to put it so I’ll post it on the blog and the group.
When I go to the author M John Harrison in my library, under “Books by M John Harrison” there are 4 books listed that are by two different guys whose names are both John Harrison.
M John Harrison is a science fiction/fantasy author
John Harrison #1 is an economist
John Harrison #2 is a travel writer
The books that don’t belong are as follows:
John Harrison #1
Finance for the Non-financial Manager: All You Need to Know … 1 copies
Marxist Economics for Socialists: A Critique of Reformism
John Harrison #2
Off the Map: A Journey Through the Amazonian Wild
Off the Map
I’m assuming that both of these titles could be combined under the correct author.
The title listed as “Tourism” DOES belong there as it is a short story written by M John Harrison and is/was available online at Amazon.
Combining variants of author names.
I'd like to combine the author Hergé (where most of my Tintin books are) with Herge (same person, no accent + where most of Tintin appears).
On the right bar it puts under "Combine with...", "No authors suggested" so how can this be done?
Hergé with the accent has 116 books listed and Herge without the accent has 280.
Thanks for your help.
Interesting. The book-combination is actually undermining the work combination, by taking away the ground on which suggestions are made... I'll take a look at it. In general, the author-combine system needs a kick-upward.
I combined the two manually.
Thanks for the help.
Tim
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