Adding books from another member

I am to add a book from another members' library but keep getting back to the normal "add books" tab.
I cannot find the item in any of the libraries that i have tried and would merely like to copy another members info as opposed to manually adding the item. Help !

You cannot simply copy another member's info. This is deliberate; it's designed to prevent the replication of bad data.

If you can't find the item in any of the data sources, you can just add it manually.

You can open the other member's listing (Book Details) in one tab/window and the Manual Add page (link at the bottom of the Add Books page) in another, and copy-and-paste the other member's info as appropriate (modifying anything that's different on your edition, of course).

I see you've entered some from the Library of Congress, probably through Overcat, as well as Amazon, so you know about trying different sources. I don't know a particularly good source for Africana, though others may - unfortunately there's currently a bug affecting trying to add sources to your list, so even if we came up with one it wouldn't help. Overcat is likely to be pretty good, though - it's all the successful library searches of LT members, plus Harvard's open data and somebody else - probably Library of Congress, I don't quite remember. It doesn't have everything, but it tends to be weakest on new fiction, which doesn't interest you much anyway, you say.

You can also check the other person's catalog to see what source that person used. However, if it was manual entry, that won't help.

If you're comfortable with greasemonkey, there's a script that will auto-fill some details into the manual add page. I haven't used it, so I'm not sure how much book information it can copy.
http://www.librarything.com/topic/115928
You could always post on that thread with questions, or contact brightcopy, who wrote the script.

LibraryThing has University of Pretoria and University of Witwatersrand as possible sources. You'll find them on the "add books" tab, under "all sources" - countries "South-Africa".

ETA: Oops, I notice there is a bug report indicating you might not be able to select those at the moment (http://www.librarything.com/topic/138209#3460622).

BarkingMatt, can you see the list of sources? I can't, which is why I couldn't list any. I bumped the bug earlier.

Yes, I can see them. Off to see if adding them works then.

ETA: Yes, works.

Interesting. OK, thanks - I'll try clearing cookies & cache and see if it works. Manlio_p - check out adding some new sources, you may find more of your books in some of the non-default ones.

Thanks guys - much appreciate all the info and quick response - www.amazon.co.uk also good for south african stuff

Amazon in general has really awful data. It's somewhat helpful, sometimes, to get the basic stuff in there - but for me, I have to edit and correct so many things it's a tossup whether I do more typing that way or with a pure manual entry. YMMV.