LT record as a template for my own record

There were good ideas presented in the Site talk:
Adding books from other users' libraries. I don't know if they have been presented before, but I quote here to get more visibility for them (I hope these members don't mind my quoting):

rorrison:
"Perhaps the Add Book button (which would work only from an individual Book record, not a Work record) could take you to the Add Manually page, with the various fields filled in -- forcing you to think about what you're adding. (And change it so the Save button is at the bottom, so you have to scroll past all the fields before you can save it.)"

timepiece:
"Maybe the secret to an "add from user" procedure would be to add the entire record - EXCEPT the ISBN. That, you would have to fill in yourself. Wouldn't that eliminate a lot of the combination issues?

I like the solution in Message 9, but leaving the ISBN field blank."

I like these ideas.

Personally, I favor the first solution. If you are worried about what is "under the hood" to begin with, it's best to come right out and show it to whoever is adding the book immediately. If you just add everything and leave off the ISBN, who knows what the originating user has done to the rest of the data, and the adding user might never look at it. Plus, it would be confusing to the adder to get everything but ISBN--this would not be an expected behavior, I think. I would guess a lot of people would either not realize or just not bother filling in the ISBN later, and that could cause more orphaning problems later anyway.

Yes, I like rorrison's solution quite a bit. Leaving off the ISBN doesn't make sense to me -- if you can only a specific edition and not a work default, why leave out the one commonly-found piece of data that comes closest to identifying that edition?

Based on some of the thread that this one links back to; the logic behind leaving out the ISBN is to address the problem that led to the add books button being disabled in the first place. Apparently, some users copy the same book across multiple times and then change just the title before saving - this leaves multiple works with the same ISBN on the system and with many of the other fields also likely to be wrong too.
Leaving the ISBN off prevents this but still makes it a lot simpler to copy, or use as a starting point, a decent record that already exists rather than having to enter everything manually.

Yes, I've read the other thread -- I just don't think the reasoning addresses the right problem.

BUMP!

I saw that Tim posted to another talk topic a little while ago, so I'm flagrantly bumping this up again. Tim, please read this!

You could just e-mail him directly. You can find his and other addresses by clicking Congratulate/Complain at the bottom of every page.

just arrived here and felt the need for something like this to give me a hand with librarything.

> 10 rreis - There was some related discussion about this kind of thing just in the past week. The Talk topic is:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/49103

The conversation is wide-ranging (I actually gave up reading, didn't get through all the posts), but at # 31 Tim includes this comment:
The plan right now is to turn the + into a add-through-lightbox. Hit it, and up comes a bunch of editions. It won't show them all, and it will allow you to launch a search instead. But it will give you a good selection that most users will be happy with.

This, however, is not easy. The UI is part of the problem, but the actual process is harder. LibraryThing does not have a set of un-adulterated bibliographic records. We have users' books, which might be changed in a hunred ways, and we have the ability to search. To get the plus working right we need our own store of bibliographic records to draw on. Hence the problem.

I don't think I ever followed up directly with Tim on this topic, not sure if anyone else did. BUT, the issue of "adding books with the green plus sign" is in his mind, so if these ideas are (maybe) better than what he proposes in the other Talk thread, not a bad idea to run them by him.

Back to work for me, unfortunately!