combing author - different

https://www.librarything.com/search.php?search=anne+d+kyle&searchtype=author...

i've never come to understand author combining. sometimes it works, others not.

if the page above appears accurately, i cannot get the final listing to combine. a few days ago, i succeeded with the first two; but, the last two just refused no matter how many times i clicked the combine button. last night, the third finally combined. now only the fourth refuses. it is not hugely important, but.....

at least when the third one went, it finally included the book i just finished.

>1 EGBERTINA: i've never come to understand author combining. sometimes it works, others not.

If you look at the the author page https://www.librarything.com/author/kyleanne, you'll notice a message "This author has combination issues that need to be cleared up." I'm not going to try to straighten it out, since I've never heard of this author (not surprising, since it's apparently someone alive in the twentieth century :-p), so I wouldn't know how to deal with them. But that can interfere with author combination sometimes. It may need someone who truly knows about the author and the author's works to clear that up, deal with disambiguations, etc. to do the proper combination.

I've rarely had trouble combining authors or books (except Chaucer -- grr!), but, to be fair, I usually deal with books and authors that have only a handful of copies.

>1 EGBERTINA:

It appears that they are all now combined, and I have dealt with the combination issues. (Simply a matter of moving the CK from the sub-page to the main page.)

>3 lilithcat: Thank you. though my screen still shows it as is. i'm sure you helped it along, though. to the best of my knowledge, the five books listed are the only ones she ever wrote. of course as a forgotten author there might be others; doubtful they can be found at this point. i have had trouble acquiring these 5

If you hover over the last entry on the search results on https://www.librarything.com/search.php?search=anne+d+kyle&searchtype=author... you'll see that it links to https://www.librarything.com/author/kyleanned-14619998

https://www.librarything.com/author/kyleanned-14619998 is a link to a CK entry on the main author page (/author/kyleanned) - it's a leftover from the unnecessary Canonical Name that was entered and removed.

You can't combine the main author page with that entry because it's really just another link to the main page.

This is just one of the reasons not to add a Canonical Name unnecessarily - it lives on in the search results forever.

>5 r.orrison: I think i added the canonical because it had been misspelled; and my works were not linking to her. i thought maybe a canonical would help it to recognize her. also, since i am the only one that has her other books, i didn't see that anybody would care.

thank you

There is something weird going on with the spelling of her name. The URL of the page is /author/kyleanne which usually means the most common form of the name is Anne Kyle, so that should appear as the author's name on the page. None of the books entered by anyone uses the form "Ann D Kyle" (https://www.librarything.com/combine.php?author=kyleanne). So I don't know where that's coming from. Normally the right way to fix that is "Recalculate Author Name" but that's not working in for this author. I think it's a bug that should be reported. (Entering a Canonical Name in this instance would make it look right, but really just cover up the bug.)

Recalculating again just fixed it, sort of. It's showing "Anne D Kyle" which at least has the spelling of Anne right, but the URL is still /author/kyleanne so I would expect the name to be Anne Kyle.

>8 r.orrison: i found a way to fix it - by recalculating the author spelled, correctly, on each book. except i entered two of mine as Anne Dempster, which seems okay. i will check and see if she used it on any of her books. the two i have in front of me, currently, only say anne d

Great - certainly fixing your own books so they're correct is the best way to start, before making changes on the author page. Fix your own books (using Edit Book), make sure they're combined correctly, then check what's showing up on the author page, combine authors if necessary, then recalculate author name if necessary. If all of that is correct, it's very unlikely that you'll need to use Canonical Name.