find work duplicates restricted to a specific collection (or collections)

I'd like to be able to find duplicate works within a specific collection: I have multiple collections, including "for sale", "sold", "on loan", etc., and my workflow is to move books from one collection to the other. What I want to do now is to find all the duplicates within my "Your Library" collection (only). The only way I can see to get close to this is the "Work duplicates" page (under "Stats/Memes", under "Home"), but unfortunately that script looks at *all* collections. So I see hundreds of duplicates: every book I've ever bought a new copy of, and then moved the original (tatty) copy to "sold", for instance, shows up as a duplicate, but the entries (duplicates) don't include their collection, so I can't tell at a glance which duplicates are genuine (two physical copies of the same work on my shelves), and which are just books that's I've replaced/upgraded/bought/sold in the past.

What I'd love is a "filter to collection" option at the top of that page; failing that, then I'd like to see the collection listed as an attribute of each work in the list of duplicates: then I could write a perl script or similar to filter down to the actual (physical) duplicates myself.

Thanks,

Mike

I would really like something like this, too. I move books to a "no longer owned" collection instead of deleting the entries, so my duplicates page is a useless list of duplicates I have already weeded.

Even if we could just have the colored checkmarks that are on author pages and lists and so on, it would make the work duplicates page a lot more useful.

I appreciate the automatic-ness of this idea, but (in addition to the multiple Collections) I use a tag (first one in the list) for Ownership that indicates if it's actually mine or belongs to someone/where else, and I put Tags on most of my catalog screens.

I'm not sure you understand the request? The "work duplicates" page is not a catalog screen, it's under stats/memes. It can't be made to show tags, either. It gives title/author/publisher and that's it. It also can't be sorted.

There are certainly other ways to find work duplicates but they are all a lot more difficult once the library reaches a certain size (especially given that some works may be under more than one different title or author.)

18 months later: this would still be such a hugely useful feature for me: the only workaround I can think of for now is to create a second account, then export the contents of the collection I want to de-dupe, then import that collection to the new account, then run the de-dupe: but that seems very painful and not scalable (and also annoying to have to maintain two paid accounts rather than one!). It would be so great if a librarything developer could add a collection filter to the duplicates page. Would a librarything developer possibly be able to comment on whether it might be feasible to add this to the roadmap?

>5 maspotts: Your workaround doesn't sound any more convenient than sorting by title within Your library (or whichever) collection, then visually scanning for duplicate titles. Are the titles on your duplicate copies often different from each other?

maspotts (#5), aspirit (#6):

You can also add "LT Work ID" as a column to one of your viewing styles, then sort by it and do the visual scan, which will deal with the "different titles on duplicate copies" issue.

Of course, if you're doing the export anyway you ought to be able to use your spreadsheet program to find duplicate Work ID fields as well.

>6 aspirit: I get your drift, but same work =/= same title. At least, not always. Dostoevsky's "The Devils" = his "The Possessed", for instance.

>8 Nicole_VanK: True, all workarounds are imperfect. The sort would put duplicates near each other unless the work titles vary. Although some LTers must be managing more variations in their editions than others (with all new editions in one language), collections containing a large number of duplicates whose titles don't match seem uncommon enough that I won't assume maspotts has one.

>7 lorax: Exports contain work IDs? Nice! That means a spreadsheet program could automatically match duplicates within a single exported collection.