Multiple authors snafus

I uploaded my Kindle library and for anthologies and multiple authored works I got multiple entries. I'd love to fix this.

My question is whether I can do this myself or if I need to report it for someone else to fix? If I can fix it is there a guide?

It's very hard to give you advice if you don't show us examples.

>1 elorin: You will need to delete all but one of the duplicate copies in your catalog and then edit the remaining copy to look the way you want it to (it's recommended to pick one author/editor to put in the "author" field and then add the additional contributors to the "other authors" field)

>3 norabelle414: Thank you very much. I will give it a shot.

Please, please use the editor's name(s) only to add any anthology initially. Often the other author names will come with -- or already be added here on LT.

If you add a contributor's name instead, even if it's a big name, it will be harder to combine your book with the others already on LT.

>5 karenb: Do you mean when editing an anthology I should not add the authors as contributors? Just use the editor?

The goal is to have an editor be the Primary author so that it's easy to find. The usual way to do this is when first adding the book to your catalog. This makes it easy for LT to combine your copy with other copies on LT, so you can take advantage of any work already done on the book by other LT members.

-- If the book has no contributors visible, go to Add/edit other authors to check for author names that may need confirming.

-- If the other authors box lists no other names, click Recalculate from members' books. LT checks the other copies of the book for further names, then pulls any into the other authors list for confirmation.

Sometimes you'll want to edit the author names to apply to all editions of the work, but that's still way faster than looking up and typing in each name yourself.

A fiction example that's already complete: Firebirds: An Anthology of Original Fantasy and Science Fiction edited by Sharyn November.

(Adding an anthology by searching under contributor name, such as Stephen King, which means that copy ends up stranded in that author's works. And then you can't use or pull in additional names that may have been added for that book.)

I hope this makes sense.

>6 elorin: Use the editor as the author. Add the contributors under 'Other Author' when editing your entry.

The next step is to have your copy combined with any other copies on LT.

Then go to Other Authors on the main work page to check that they are properly attributed there.

Most of elorin's multi-added books are 1) novels with two authors (e.g. Breach of Peace by Daniel Gibbs and Gary T. Stevens) and 2) e-book compilations of novels which don't have a credited editor (e.g. Star Crossed: 7 Novels of Space Exploration, Alien Races, Adventure, and Romance). There's no way around having to use an author in the author field in these cases.

The books that have an editor seem to have added normally, with no problems (e.g. Magicats! by Jack Dann).

>9 norabelle414:

There's no way around having to use an author in the author field in these cases.

In those cases, I'll put the first listed author in the author field. It's not at all unusual in non-fiction to have multiple authors with no editor.

>10 lilithcat: In those cases, I'll put the first listed author in the author field. It's not at all unusual in non-fiction to have multiple authors with no editor.

Which is what is done on the copyright page, too. It's unfair, in a way, since it means that (usually) the author who is alphabetically first gets the primary listing, but that's the way the system works. :-( The trick is to remember, when editing the authorship information on books that aren't in the system, to make joint authors primary authors and contributors or the like secondary authors.

It does sound as if this is a place where there perhaps should be some sort of mechanism to clean up the Kindle import. Maybe not by LibraryThing; maybe we should create an Excel spreadsheet or something to clean it up. Not knowing what the data looks like in the Kindle import, though, I can't guess what would be required.

I just checked. A book that was edited by my niece and another person shows up in site search, (work search, searching her name) even though the book has the other editor as primary author, and Joanne as main author in 'Other Authors'. (In my catalogue she is shown as the author.)

>12 MarthaJeanne:

As long as the other authors are so listed on the work page, they should show up in a site search. If they're just listed in a person's catalog, and not added on the work page, they won't.

My point was that the books can be found easily even for the authors who are not the primary author. I suspect search also gets difficult for those that are only entered as 'Doe, Adam Clarke and John' or some such. That does not credit either John Doe or Adam Clarke.

>14 MarthaJeanne:

There are other really complicated situations. My college physics text was University Physics, which, in the edition I have, was credited to Sears, Zemansky and Young. The edition before mine was credited to Sears and Zemansky. Thirty years later, what was the newest edition of (theoretically) the same book was by Hugh D. Young and Roger A. Freedman -- no Sears or Zemansky on the cover page. And I see that Freedman is now responsible for a book called College Physics, though it may be a separate book.

Based on my experiments, it is not possible, by an author search, to find both the second (Sears and Zemansky) and sixth (Young and Freedman) editions of University Physics with the same search, even though there is continuous variation from the first to the sixth (and probably beyond). Admittedly not many people will have both, but there are some professors who will. And the sixth edition is so different from the first that they probably deserve to be called different books, but where is the dividing line?

Joy of Cooking is a good case of that. For those cases somebody needs to make the decisions AND create a series.

>14 MarthaJeanne: Yeah I think we can all agree that the primary author should be one singular person/entity, whether that be an editor or an author.

>11 waltzmn: It does sound as if this is a place where there perhaps should be some sort of mechanism to clean up the Kindle import. Maybe not by LibraryThing; maybe we should create an Excel spreadsheet or something to clean it up. Not knowing what the data looks like in the Kindle import, though, I can't guess what would be required.
I've never seen this issue before, so I'm not sure if it's the result of a recent change that has been made to Kindle export, or specific to something about @elorin 's export/import, or just a one-off error. I think we should keep an eye out for others having the same problem in the future.

>7 karenb: Yes, that made sense. Thank you.
>8 MarthaJeanne: Once I straighten up the authors I need to have them combined? By adding to one of the threads in this group?

If there is already a work, but your copy isn't in it, yes, they need to be combined. You can do it yourself or post in the current request thread.

There is little point in confirming the other authors on a singleton if it's already been done on the main work.

I'm new to this kind of housecleaning on LT and I am unclear as to what I should be doing. I was looking at my library and saw duplicates where I knew there shouldn't be. I cleaned up a few by putting all of the authors in one entry and deleting the others.

Now it sounds like this was misguided. And also once I am done I (may or may not) need to combine them. I've seen references to doing the combining on a workbench but I am not clear on when it's necessary.

I'm doing most of my use of Library Thing on a cell phone. Does that limit functionality?

>20 elorin: You're doing just fine.
There are two types of data on LibraryThing: book-level data and work-level data
Book-level data is what you have entered in your own catalog. You can do mostly whatever you want with this
Work-level data is the aggregate of all of the same books that have been combined together, plus even more information (called common knowledge)

At the book level, you want to make sure your catalog doesn't have duplicate entries, so you've been deleting the duplicates, which is great

At the work level, you won't get the aggregate data or common knowledge that other users have entered if the book in your catalog isn't combined with all the other books that other users have. If you have two duplicate books in your catalog and you combine them with everyone else's books, you'll still have two duplicate books in your catalog.

Here's an example:

There is one copy of this work in your catalog: https://www.librarything.com/work/30887744 (1637: No Peace Beyond the Line)
By searching the site for the title, I also found this work: https://www.librarything.com/work/23828224

You can see that the second page has a lot more information on it, like other people's tags, other authors, series information, etc. and that it says 49 members have the work instead of 1.

To combine the two together:
1) On one of the work pages, click "add work to workbench" at the bottom of the right side of the page
2) On the other work page, click "add work to workbench"
3) In the popup, Click the yellow "combine works" button
4) On the next page select both items you want to combine, then click "combine selected works"

>22 norabelle414:

An addendum to this helpful explanation: If you look at the list of books in "Your Books," there will be a count of how many people own the work. Typically it will look like a small blue-grey icon of a round head and shoulders. For example, the top book on your list is Red Mars. As lf when I write this, there are 8,164 copies in the system. Your next book is Warbreaker. There are 4,304 copies of this. So these works have been combined. If this number is 1, as with Lucky's Hand (Sandweller Syndicate Series Book 1), then your book may be uncombined (although it appears that, in fact, you may have the only copy of that one). But on your second page, I strongly suspect that your copy of New Oxford American Dictionary needs to be combined, using the methods described by norabelle414.

Good luck!

>23 waltzmn: >21 norabelle414: >22 norabelle414:. Thank you very much. That makes things clearer.