Huge number of related works returned by ThingISBN

Hi - hope it's OK to post this here.

I'm a systems librarian for a consortium of small libraries. We use the ThingISBN API within our Koha library management system to flag up alternative editions in our catalogue. It generally works beautifully, but we've hit a problem with one book, "Managing long Covid syndrome" by Thanthullu Vasu, ISBN 9781913755201 (https://koha.healthlibrariesmidlands.nhs.uk/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=129762)

This book has no LibraryThing record that I can find. Searching for the ISBN returns Women of the Bible which it definitely isn't. But the main problem is that https://www.librarything.com/api/thingISBN/9781913755201 returns 7981 related ISBNs, which our system tries to work through, then times out. I've had to remove the ISBN from the record to stop people getting proxy errors.

Can anything be done about this? Am I misunderstanding something? Or is there anywhere else I should be asking? Any tips would be very welcome. Thanks for reading.

That's not really a bug but a combination issue - the Women of the Bible has a LOT of unrelated books tangled into it. Let me see what I can do about it.

The LT data belongs to the user and often people add one book and then change it to be another - leaving the old ISBN in place. Which causes issues. That is not the case here (or not completely) - either the autocombiner misfired a lot or someone was doing something weird.

I think I got all the interlopers out. See if it looks better now?

Although it may need some time to reindex the search so give it a day.

When you see something else like that, post in the Combiners groups :) We will be happy to untangle it.

>3 AnnieMod: Thank you very much! I'll take a look tomorrow. Much appreciated :)

I recently also separated a lot of unrelated works from the Women of the Bible work. It seems to act like the black hole works that pop up sometimes. I don't know what to do about that, except check it regularly for cleanup.

Closing, thanks for everyone's help on this!

>6 kristilabrie: Actually you may want to leave this open and let someone in the dev team look into that work (https://www.librarything.com/work/17064) and find out what is going on. I just pulled https://www.librarything.com/work/29649625 out of it and it was not there yesterday. This really should not be happening.

>7 AnnieMod: Ah, gotcha, will do, thanks.

Unfortunately, I'm still getting the original problems for the book with ISBN 9781913755201 (Managing long Covid syndrome):

- https://www.librarything.com/api/thingISBN/9781913755201 returns 7981 records

- https://www.librarything.com/search.php?search=9781913755201 returns Women of the Bible , even though this ISBN is not listed on the Editions page for Women of the Bible

It may help to know that the ThingISBN API also returns 7981 records for 0310223520, the first ISBN on the record for Women of the Bible

I tried searching LibraryThing for a couple of the other ISBNs in the list returned by ThingISBN. In each case, the only search result was Women of the Bible, although the ISBN in fact belonged to an unrelated book with a title which does not exist in LibraryThing (e.g. 1498593860, which is the 10-digit ISBN for a book called "Poverty and neglected tropical diseases in the American rural South")

Is it possible that ISBNs which do not yet exist in LibraryThing are being mapped to Women of the Bible?

(And if so, would I solve my immediate problem by creating a LibraryThing record for my book, "Managing long Covid syndrome"? Or would that confuse matters further?)

Having said all of that, some publishers have reused ISBNs (for unrelated books). Ugh, but some did.

Doing a search of Librarything for the title you keep giving, there is no record of that book here. And we are not a source for books. We don't have a list of every book in existence, just those books that people chose to catalog here for their connection to the book. So adding it to the system might help

Also, I thought the API got shut down while they worked on converting from LT1.0 to LT 2.0? Maybe that was just creation of new API links.

>12 MarthaJeanne: Aha - thanks, that helps. I'll get it disabled at our end.

>8 kristilabrie: Any chance of someone looking into this one? I keep needing to bail out and rescue at least 10 new titles every few days out from this one...

One piece of information that may be relevant: these are all new titles that should not have been combined anywhere - either completely new or different enough not to be caught into their proper counterpart.

>14 AnnieMod: I'm wondering how much of this is the database issues they've been trying to fix all weekend.

>15 gilroy: This had been going on for weeks (and probably much longer than that) with this specific book - so it is not from this weekend. This work looks like another Black hole work basically - catching random new books which should stay in their own new works. Which is why I have it on my todo list to check it twice per week or so and rescue any book it catches.

>16 AnnieMod: True, it has been going on for a while. But we don't know how long the sysadmin had been monitoring this database issue before the repairs this weekend.

>17 gilroy: Considering that this is not the first black hole work that LT had acquired, I really don't think it is something recent but who knows. It is the auto-combiner that spectacularly misfires and connect unrelated books into the black holes for some reason... Can it be an underlying DB issue? Sure. But it can also be because of the ID of these books or an index collision or the timestamp the books are created on (for all we know) or even the phase of the moon and the temperature of the hamsters turning the DB wheel :)

>8 kristilabrie: Ping.

Is anyone looking into why this one is catching so many unrelated books? I just rescued 5 more and I had been separating about that many most days since mid-January...

I was just trying to flag all the wrong descriptions, but there are too many of them, and I couldn't finish.

>20 MarthaJeanne: Something is off with the work - it attracts all kinds of unrelated ISBNs - which will also attract the descriptions for these books :(

It is a black hole work - I wonder if we should separate the actual books out and leave this work as a real black hole and just bail out things when needed without worrying about that specific book. On the other hand, if it is one of the records inside causing the issue to show up, this will just move it to another work... so I would rather wait on someone in LT to look into it.

>19 AnnieMod: I'm asking @timspalding about this, though he's supposed to be on vacation this week so we may not have an update for awhile. Sorry for the wait!

Will check back later today. The ISBN data here is cached. I'm rebuilding the core data, so we'll see if that fixes it.

Fixed.

>24 timspalding: It caught https://www.librarything.com/work/29916938/book/236374994 today (I just pulled it out) so does not seem fixed…

What?

Click this https://www.librarything.com/api/thingISBN/9781913755201

Closing. Bug in #1 is fixed.