OK I guess I'm just an idiot but I have to ask...

Am I missing something? The Mote in God's Eye is now listed under both authors and is listed on both author pages without being split! I knew true co-authorship of works was in the master plan but I can't find any announcement about the change. Is this some kind of beta thing that surfaced prematurely? How exactly does this miracle work? Because right now The Illuminatus Trilogy page says it is co-authored by Robert Shea and Robert Shea. I gots to fix that!

Thanks for any help and if I'm just being an idiot don't worry I'm used to it.

See the other authors - the confirmed ones. This is where these secondary records come from. Why someone confirmed the author as "other author" in the second case is beyond me.

Wow. Thanks for the quick reply. I'm familiar with the *secondary* author system, which I use mostly to record cover artists, illustrators, translators, etc. But I assume you're talking about something else. How does an "other author" get confirmed? Where is that info? I don't see a field for it in CK. Sorry to be a pain...

Scroll down on the work page. There is a section for the Other authors. Searching for "Add/edit other authors" finds it pretty fast:)

It gets confirmed by someone confirming it basically - I usually add manually the other author that need to be confirmed and that's it.. See how it looks like on both books.

As far as I know this is still a Beta feature, restricted to members of the Beta group. What it means is that someone has marked the second listed author as belonging to this book. The feature is still in development, though, and still a little buggy, which means it sometimes ends up with weird results, like the same author listed twice. One problem here is that the book's author shows up differently for you depending on whether you have the book or not. If you have it, the first author will always be whatever you have listed on your own copy; if not, then it will be the "winning" author. But the "winning" author can change.

Ah-Ha! Thank you. The only 'other author' info I could find was related to my particular book, not to the work over all, so I knew that couldn't be it. I'm not part of any beta groups that I know of so I don't know why I'm seeing this. Maybe someone decided it was ready for prime time. Love the idea. I hope the bugs get worked out soon. Which author gets listed first seems like a trivial matter to me, though probably not to the authors...

I think the rest of us see the results, but can't see the bit AnnieMod talks about.

Right, only Beta users can actually set the Other Authors CK section but everyone can see the results (even the buggy ones).

OOOh, I want the author issue to be resolved so we can have that across the board. For instance, my husband and I coauthored a little book and it bugs me to no end that it shows up on his Authorship page but not mine. I'm the coauthor but no one would know that from LibraryThing.

I hope this spreads out and is seen on a lot of these books soon. It is one of the things that I dislike about LT the most. I own a number of books where I wasn't happy with the way the authorship looked.

>1 revelshade:
I switched secondary authors on The Illuminatus Trilogy. For what I think is the strong majority of users it should now display correctly. But the minority who give Robert Anton Wilson top billing will now see his name listed twice.

>9 Keeline: Amen. Lot of good co-authors getting short-changed under the current system.

>10 eromsted: Thanks, it's fixed for me.

But- OUCH! If the main issue with the system is that it will display nonsensical author info unless you list your book under the *right* primary author, that's a huge problem. Issues of authorship are tricky as hell and fans can have very strong feelings about them. Illuminatus! is a good example. Very few Robert Shea fans out there. But Robert Anton Wilson has scads and most of them think of Wilson as the real author given that the Illuminatus 'brand' stayed with him while Shea went off and did his own thing. If they want Wilson to get top billing in their libraries who are we to say they're wrong?

Ouch - sorry - typing too late and forgot what is beta and what not.

>12 revelshade:
Agreed. The other practical option for the present is to remove any work level other author and wait for the feature to be finished properly. I only added a few work level other authors when the feature came out in beta and then gave up because of the problems.

As to The Illuminatus trilogy, the edition page indicates that over 90% of members with the book have entered Robert Shea as the primary author. So if we're going to add a beta-feature work level other author I think it should be done in the way that will look right for the overwhelming majority of the owners of the work and for anyone else who happens by the page.

But the people who have entered Robert Anton Wilson as the primary author are certainly not wrong, and to be complete the feature needs to work for them too.

Using Illuminatus! as a paradigm, we can conclude that the current (non-)system of dual authorship is mostly shafting authors whose surnames are late in the alphabet, since authors of equal weight and contribution (as Shea and Wilson were when Illuminatus! was first issued) tend to be listed alphabetically. Thingamabrarians tend, as faithful catalogers, to use the sequence of authors given on the cover or title page!

The solution to the duplicate main authors thing is to have the display look at all the main authors and only put up the one(s) that don't match your own entry (so if I list Robert Anton Wilson as author, he should not also be shown as the second author - Robert Shea should be). Which is trivial for a human and _really_difficult_ for a computer. It's a display issue, though, not a data issue (well, not in itself - LT has the data that those two are the co-main authors. Some (many) other books don't yet have full data). Pesky stuff like that is why the entire feature is still BETA, rather than fully released. Inshallah Tim et al will work it all out, and we can rejoice...