Other Authors

I recently added a copy of The Divine Comedy:

https://www.librarything.com/work/44123/book/279082167

That book lists 90+ additional authors, most of whom were NOT involved with my specific version. Do I leave it the way it is or do I edit down the list of additional authors to just those 4 or 5 who contributed to my specific edition? When I click on an author, I am always interested in the "You have x books in your library" message. But, clearly I don't have books from all the additional authors listed here. Do I just live with this; is there a work-around?
Thanks in advance

>1 Nonconformisto:

Leave it the way it is. The "Other Authors" field includes all other authors associated with the work, not those associated solely with your copy of the work. If you edit the list down in the way you suggest, you are removing data that does apply to other members' editions.

LT has only two levels of data - book and work level - no edition layer. The work level contains all data for all editions. What you see here is the work data - if you remove that, you remove it for everyone.

You can control what is in your book (Book edit screen) but please do not destroy the community data because it does not match your edition.

>1 Nonconformisto:

if you look closely at those other authors, you will find that they are listed as contributing to some editions, e.g. my copy of the Inferno is by Dante Alighieri with John Ciardi as translator. Ciardi is associated with my copy, but is only associated with yours if he's listed as a secondary author on your work page.

So, as long as none of the authors listed on your work page are incorrect for your copy, you don't need to worry about it. The authors of the work as a whole are only those listed as being authors of all copies. Which, for the Divine Comedy, should only be Dante.

That's a normal situation. Those 90+ other authors are listed on the work record rather than your own book record. The purpose of that section is to show every contributor across all the assorted editions of the work. Notice most of the names say "some editions".

Your book (look for the section header on the page named "Book Information") only lists:
Authors: Dante Alighieri (Author)
Other authors: John Ciardi (Translator), Archibald T. MacAllister (Introduction)

So there's nothing to delete. One thing that is wrong, in the overall list, is for Ciardi (Translator) and MacAllister (Introduction) to show as "all editions", because they didn't contribute to every edition. So that wants changing to "some editions".

Thanks for the quick responses. I appreciate it.

>5 Nevov: I changed Ciardi and MacAllister to 'some editions'

In my case I want to do the opposite. I just read a HUGE anthology, Portable Feminist Reader edited by Roxanne Gay. When I look down the Overview page I can see a section where it shows all the many contributors. I would like to INCLUDE those in my book information . . . is there any way to do that without me typing them all in? I can't seem to figure out where that info is coming from. Does that mean someone has already typed them in and if I add their copy to my library I would have all those names? Is it even possible to do that?

I just bought that book, and I was very glad to see that somebody had already taken the time and effort to get the other authors into the work record.

Yes somebody must have done it. That doesn't actually mean it is in their book details, though. Which is rather beside the point, as you can't get their book record into your account, anyway. If you found a source that listed all the contributors, you could delete your current record, and reenter it from that source.

Without having the authors in your account you can't actually search for them. However, if you are looking at their author page, you will see a checkmark next to the title.

>8 LucindaLibri: I just looked at the Overview and see the long list (and I second the appreciation @MarthaJeanne expressed for whoever put all those other authors into the work record!). If I had that book and had just entered it into LT, and if I'd had the brains to look at the Overview page, I would
- open the Overview page in a separate browser tab,
- hit the "show all 62" link below the handful of listed contributors,
- make sure that I had another browser tab in "Edit Book" mode for my copy of the work,
- and use my mouse and copy/paste to get all those folks into my Book's page.

I might do that copy/paste author by author, since they're so helpfully in Last,First format, or I might do the copy/paste of the entire list into a powerful text editor like BBEdit and do some slicing & dicing there, perhaps with the help of an Excel spreadsheet. Depends on the condition of my brain and the number of pets pestering me at the moment :)

YMMV, of course!

>10 LeslieWx: I try to do the same. And then also add the author names to Summary, i.e. Portable Feminist Reader by a, b, c, ,d, e, ... edited by Roxanne Gay

(You also might want to confirm the authors for the work. I've found that the recent redesign hides this in a way so I can't easily find it, so I've more or less stopped doing the confirmation.)

Thanks all. I may or may not try to tackle this. Thanks for the good ideas about how to make it happen . . . though I do wish it were easier!

>11 bnielsen: Oh, that thought about the summary is a nice one. And if I've already got the names in BBEdit and/or a spreadsheet, not too hard.

With this conversation in mind, yesterday I decided to apply the idea to the 42 contributing editors of Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia: Aeronautics, Astronomy, Biochemistry, Botany, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Civil Engineering, Computer Technology, Electrical Engineering, Electronics, Geology, Guided Missiles, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, Medicine, Metallurgy, Meteorology, Mineralogy, Navigation, Nuclear Science and Engineering, Photoelectronics, Photography, Physics, Planetary Exploration, Radio and Television, Rocketry, Space Travel, Statistics, Zoology

If I look at the Overview page, under "Author Information" if I click on the "87 possible other authors" I'll get a pop-up that allows confirmation. Ahh, clicking the "Edit" button on the same line as "Author Information" gets me the same pop-up! Yesterday I confirmed about half of the Contributing Editors I entered; all the others came up with double entries, one labelled "Editor" and one labelled "–". I don't know what to do with that, or why "Contributing Editor" showed up for some and not others.

I also don't know what to do about Douglas M. Considine, whose name appears nowhere in the front matter of my volume (or on library records of it, or of earlier volumes that I've found), making him clearly NOT a name for "all editions"!

I'm kind of at the stage where I have to choose between making progress on getting books in reasonably well and untangling big problems without getting more bookshelves dusted. That's my excuse for this, that it's my treat for cleaning an absurd amount of dust off the shelves and thinking about where we're going to put the unshelved books :)

>13 LeslieWx: Yes, the summary is the easy part. Putting them into Other Authors is a bit of pain. The button to add another author moves down as you add them and although it says Add Author it doesn't autofill with the Author role, so I typically count say 20 new authors and click on Add Author 20 times and then go tab tab tab A tab tab tab A ... for a while :-) And then I fill in the names. So yes, anthologies are a lot of fun.

At least if you're adding "Contributing Editor" it adds that role to the list of options once you've used it on that work, so you don't have to keep typing it in!

But the adding, yeah.

>15 LeslieWx: I should add that I have a script that takes the tsv export file and checks summary against the list of other authors. Years ago the summary field has some low length limit, but that's no longer the case.

Wow, here's a library catalog entry that's pretty awesome (and time consuming!)
https://library.nscs.edu/record=b1142497~S1