New Meme Dead or Alive

I noticed this morning there is a new Meme, "Dead or Alive". It's a count of whether authors in your library are Dead, Alive or Unknown. I assume it uses the Common Knowledge info to determine the state.

However, the lists does not match my particular authors. I have several Pablo Neruda books, he is not in the list. In addition the page lists as You and None Other on the browser and tab heading.

Very neat idea. I have several authors who I am curious about. Sort of a Beta thing?

It appears to be Tim's list. He's fixing it later.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/56267

See also Bug Collectors: http://www.librarything.com/topic/56267

Should be a neat feature once it's worked out.

Well done, Scorbet. :-)

It now lists my authors, but how does it determine who is dead or alive ?

One of my authors is listed in the dead column, but isn't: Laurell K. Hamilton

There is only a DOB in CK, nothing about date of death.

How do you fix it when there is isn't anything wrong in CK, but the person is in the wrong column ?

>6 FicusFan: There was, at one point, "N/A" written in the date of death field for her. Does the meme look to see if there is any content or if there is a history of content?

Yeah, I've got J.K. Rowling in the "dead" column, too.

Neat feature, though! In theory at least.

I don't know, but 1.) NA isn't a date of death, or even a number (should be testing for a least that if not for an actual dates), and 2.) if it tracks history it would never get anywhere, since user editable fields can be changed all the time.

Maybe someone was commenting on her writing and put a date in, and it was erased ?

Of course that begs the question, how often does it update? Is this going to be another bell/whistle that looks cool, but in fact is unable to stay current ?

>8 jfslone: That one, again, also had a death date entered (" NEVER!!!!") but it was subsequently erased.

Probably should also give you the gender and recail make up to. How else will we know the percent of "Dead White Guys"?

Yes! 254 male 314 female and 2506 other. Now that would be something.

(Actually saw a class list once that said 15 students, 8 male, 6 female. We had fun trying to figure out who/what else would be in the class.)

'Dead White Guys' is a state of mind, not just race and gender.

There is also a section at the very bottom of the Unknowns for Zombies!

I have been bouncing back and forth between author pages and Wikipedia.

For those who noticed, the bug where J. K. Rowling was dead because sometime in the past she was listed as dead, is now fixed.

Why is Susan Blackmore listed as dead?

And Laurell K. Hamilton ??

ETA:

I see she too has been moved into the right column. Thanks

And Jacques Barzun?

I've changed it so that if something has a gender of "n/a" it classifies it as "Not a Person" rather than dead, alive or unknown. So, yes, your gender determines whether you're alive or not—I won't even get into the sexual politics of that!

I think this is a nefarious plot to get more date of birth/death/gender information into CK... Seems to be working ;-)

I think this is a nefarious plot to get more date of birth/death/gender information into CK... Seems to be working ;-)

You caught us. It's working like Hell!

> 21

It's true.

This is going to be such a time sink! Unfortunately, I'm not stopping at "birth/death/gender". After all, as long as I'm looking someone up, I might as well add their birthplace. And where they went to school. And who they schtupped . . .

(Rubs hands together evilly)

I have a listing in the unknown column of the author

R Bakker

When I click to the author page it says it is a fragment for an author name. Most books are in a foreign language and I HAVE NO BOOKS listed on the page. So why does this person appear in my authors list ?

I do have R. Scott Bakker, and Robert T. Bakker as authors, but they have been entered correctly.

And if the primary author is a publisher or organization...?

>24 FicusFan:

Thousand Fold Thought shows in your catalogue with R Bakker as the author.

(FYI, the reason you don't show as having books on the R Bakker page because your book has been combined with the R. Scott Bakker copies.)

>25 bookel:, corporate authors are listed under "not a person" toward the bottom of the unknown column.

OK, maybe I'm dense, but if someone's in the unknown column, how do we change it?

Add the birth/death information to CK - though I'm not quite sure what to do in the case of a live author who already has a birthdate but is in the Unknown column.

Okay so how do you put it in the 'not a person' column?

-30 Change the gender to n/a. I tried it, it works!

Cool! I like this feature. In fact, as I was scanning my lists, I saw one shown alive that I knew was dead so I went to CK and added his dates. I hope I don't get addicted to this too!

So what makes a zombie? Death date

I was just going to ask the same thing. Is 'zombie' really necessary, and what is it?

Is something like "Brothers Grimm" considered "not a person"? I'd say it's more like a corporate name as far as MARC records are concerned. Of course in real, official MARC; Jacob and Wilhelm are "4xx / see" entries, I think.

-34 It is absolutely necessary and no laughing matter. How else will you to avoid their "book signings", commonly known to be excellent brain harvesting events?

What about authors that are made up of more than one author? Eg. I know of one that was co-written by three people and their names were combined for the pseudonym.

I am not laughing. Still want to know what the definition is of 'zombie' for the site's purposes.

38,
Perhaps it's all in fun?

-38 I think it is pretty clearly a joke category. Did you see the blog article?

Don't have time to read it.

It's a joke, and it's stayin'.

Maybe next Halloween all dead authors will become zombies.

38> I think it was obviously a joke, and funny. Though I did want to enter a death date and no birth date, or a birth date after the death date, to see if I could get it to be populated.

42>

Maybe next Halloween all dead authors will become zombies.

Is this the end of zombie Shakespeare?

I love that line.

I object to treating institutional authors differently from people. Certainly they don't have birth and death dates, but they can have dates of organization and dissolution.

e.g. the Federal Writers' Project was established, according to Wikipedia, on July 27, 1935 and continued until 1943. It is now organizationally dead. The Boston Women's Health Book Collective was incorporated in 1972, according to their timeline, and remains alive and well organizationally speaking.

I second the inclusion of zombies. Since it is so difficult to prove a negative, you won't ever know that you don't have any until you meet one. Hope that makes sense....

Okay, first I want to thank you for recognizing that not all authors fit into the tidy categories of "dead" and "alive" that we're so used to! That said, I object to the use of the term "zombies", which has a history of being used pejoratively, and also far oversimplifies the experiences of the those who write from beyond the grave. (I prefer the term "unconventionally animate", but "undead" will do.)

Also, can you let me know how to get an author into that category? I've just been trying to correct my listing for Phylos the Thibetan, but I'm sure I'll run into similar cases later.

Thanks! ;D

Look, we need every early warning detector for the impending zombie apocalypse we can get!

:)

And am I the only one with You Spin Me Right Round stuck in their head right now?

Yeah?

That's what I thought.

grumbles something incoherent about 60 gigs of music on an iPod probably being waaaay too much

I can't stop playing the Jonathan Coulton zombie song "Re: Your Brains."

http://www.jonathancoulton.com/primer/listen/

Pure genius.

I've been killing people left and right all evening. It's a great stress-reliever.

>49 timspalding: Compelling argument...Impasse - and it's good they don't want to eat my eyes...

then again, you've made me remember cheesy 80s video with your meme title!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCiVXigrjjQ

perhaps I toss my food and guns now and just submit! =P

Might some living authors be a little uncomfortable having their year of birth listed? You know, it's not supposed to be polite to ask people their age....
A lot of my "unknowns" are for academic authors, and I know that they're alive. I started to add information for a few people, but I felt weird adding that one person, a professor in a related field to mine, was born in 1965, or someone else in 1952, etc., so I didn't add anything. When it comes to a few such authors whom I've actually met, or who are at my university, I would just feel creepy entering information about them. I think I'll stick to entering information about the dead people.

I too was curious about the zombies! :)

>52 rsterling:

Hey, man, libraries use date of birth as the *primary* way to identify ambiguous authors. (AUTOCAT, a catalogers list, had a great talk about one such case, some actress who wrote a memoir and whose birthdate was systematically fudged, totally undermining the whole system.)

53> True, and I can find year of birth on wikipedia for quite a few people. Still, I'll leave these to someone else, I think; I don't mind adding information for really famous authors - people where there are hundreds or thousands of copies on LT. There are plenty of those - and dead people - to keep me busy... :)

#47 wrote: "That said, I object to the use of the term "zombies", which has a history of being used pejoratively, and also far oversimplifies the experiences of the those who write from beyond the grave. (I prefer the term "unconventionally animate", but "undead" will do.)"

Point taken. May I also suggest "Neither here nor there" as an alternative?

k4k

#26,

That is very odd. I ran a search before I posted, and that book came back at the time as Scott Bakker, which isn't correct (sb: R. Scott Bakker), but not the R. Bakker is later became.

#55 - that would certainly be a very evocative descriptor for people (like Phylos) who are writing from the astral plane!

"The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated"

Oh wait, they haven't.

I'm wondering if we could add a field for theological status—sainted, excommunicated, enlightened, etc.

How about seen at a shopping mall?

Robert

>52 rsterling:
yes, I would like it if there was a way to indicate "Alive" without a date of birth - there are at least two authors in my library who I know are alive (well one was ten minutes ago, and the other when she sent Christmas cards), but who I would not want to enter birth dates for.

#59 It'd have to allow multiple values, probably with dates, for people who've dallied with more than one religion. Or maybe we could use the Facebook-style "It's complicated" as a catch-all.

On a more serious note, does anyone have a convention to suggest for persons (i) who are certainly dead but whose dates of death are unknown (and, in the case of some ancient writers, guessable only with a margin of error of centuries) or (ii) whose existence is uncertain? Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite is an example of someone who falls into both of those categories.

59>
surely sainted and excommunicated come under awards and honors.

>43 lorax: et al Though I did want to enter a death date and no birth date, or a birth date after the death date, to see if I could get it to be populated.

http://www.librarything.com/author/utrillomaurice

Maurce Utrillo has a picture of a grave and CK burial place but no date of death - zombie?

63> It may be improper, but I just wrote dead in a few such cases, and it worked. (Plenty of medieval and earlier writers without even a proper name, let alone dates.)

>65 abbottthomas:

Oh, that's a good point. We could mine the burial place too. I doubt there are many authors with a burial place and no dates, though.

63> It may be improper, but I just wrote dead in a few such cases, and it worked.

Why not give approximate dates? For example, enter the floruit into both living and death dates.

So for Beowulf poet 8th - 11th century?

"5th-6th c. BCE" is one of the pieces of example text for the CK date fields, so there's always been support for approximate dates.

Too bad there's not some sort of "not quite dead yet" check-box that can be ticked. I know that some of my unknown authors are alive--but I don't know them well enough to ask them when they were born.

The other box we need is 'partially dead' of 'half-dead'. Ive just looked at Paul Jennings - the English 'half' on the page is defiitely dead, his Australian namesake survives .....

My brain hurts ...

66> I just wrote dead in a few such cases, and it worked.
Could we similarly just write "alive" in one of the boxes? Aside from the fact that I'm not comfortable looking for and entering certain people's birth dates, it's actually not always easy to find out when some living authors are born. Occasionally birth years are listed in library catalogs, but often not. Or, could we list an approximate date like "20th century" in the birth field, and still have them count as alive?

75>
I just tried "20th Century" as date of Birth for Alison Sharrock but she is then categorised as dead. This is somewhat premature...

Most of the birth/death dates I've been adding came from Wikipedia and other public, internet accessible sources. In that case, having detailed dates in LT seems harmless enough.

Mind you, in adding the birth date for my cousin who has written several books, I used only his year of birth, even though I had more exact info, because the information came from private sources and was not (as far as I could find) available online.

I have way more unknowns that knowns in my list but when I started to try to google for info I couldn't find anything. For the first one, I found a web page for the author but no mention of birth date, although I'm fairly certain that she is alive.

>78 jjwilson61:
I tried the same thing for several authors in my "unkown" column who, I'm fairly certain, are still alive. I could find all sorts of information through Google, but not dates of birth.

When googling for authors not in Wikipedia I found Library Thing usually in the top 10 references.

What about LT Authors? I have three in my unknown list who have active LT memberships, which presumably makes them living, right?

My brain hurts ...

Be careful. That often happens and then you're dead.

What about LT Authors? I have three in my unknown list who have active LT memberships, which presumably makes them living, right?

If you find any who are dead and also lifetime members, let me know and I'll hit up their descendants for money.

If you find any who are dead and also lifetime members, let me know and I'll hit up their descendants for money.

No such luck, Chuck. Although I was amused to find one had rated her own book with five stars.

> Although I was amused to find one had rated her own book with five stars.

It would be weirder if they had rated their own book with one star...

> 59

And "un-excommunicated".

What's the status of Lefebvre's bones now? Un-excommunicated? How about "Shunned." There ought to be some of those.

...... Yet another thread to star specifically for it's ability to make me laugh!

I noticed this feature the other night and I looooove it! I refuse to start entering dates, though, because that will suck me into CK and I've done so good not getting addicted to it so far.

>It would be weirder if they had rated their own book with one star...

Well, they might have found the ending predictable.

"How many of your authors are dead?"

Why can't that sentence be more positive and less depressing by saying, "How many of your authors are alive?"

Bookel, I agree. I would much rather have it ask how many are alive. I have been checking my "unknown" list and have been saddened to see that several of them are dead. It has been sobering. On the other hand, I can't find a way to make some of them living who I know are just that. For example Walter C. Willett is presently chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard. I think there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that he is alive.

Hmmm. What a marketing campaign. Stop by LT and prove you're not dead !

I've been horrified looking some of mine up to come across all the death announcements of people I was 'sure' were still alive. Quite apart from anything else, it means no more books by them.

Why can't that sentence be more positive and less depressing by saying, "How many of your authors are alive?"

Because the former is funnier?

Hmmm. What a marketing campaign. Stop by LT and prove you're not dead !

Yes, we should make authors dead by default--basically, prove it, guys.

I try and avoid getting sucked into LT time-sinks, but this one ... there was just no escaping from.

Can I get back to entering the books that I just resurrected from the garage, please?

So this meme is the equivalent of: Bring Out Your Dead ?

Obviously a lot of people are doing things here. I've got about 20 fewer unknowns than last night.

I can establish that Jane Lemon was allive as of mid-2008, but no birth date.

First we deal with the living and the dead. Then we introduce gender (hey, it's already tracked in CK). At that point, we'd only be one attribute away from knowing the truth about ourselves and our libraries. I wonder how many members who consider themselves (err...ourselves) to be forward-thinking, gender-blind, culturally-inclusive, non-eurocentric, post-canonical readers would be shocked to discover that our libraries are still dominated by books written by dead white males.

>97 SilentInAWay: Mind you, 7/10 of the LT top books were written by a live woman - OK she is white. ;-)

Oh, I've done the math myself before, my library is very much female-dominated. Female writers as well as main characters.

The male/female thing is coming, for sure.

Incidentally, if someone is dead but there's no burial entry, can we class them as "the walking dead"?

Since this has been the most active thread on Dead or Alive, I thought I'd cross-post a wonderful suggestion from auntmarge64. The Library of Congress is a great place to find some of your more elusive birth & death dates:

http://catalog.loc.gov

And I will crosspost that you should use authorities.loc.gov!

Well, if you want to search LC data for birth and death dates, you'll probably want the authorities section:

http://authorities.loc.gov

Katya, you are LATE!

Sorry, I was chasing an ambulance!

Librarians...

Actually (to be serious for a second) UMaine isn't a NACO library (i.e., we don't contribute name authorities to the LC), so I don't get to do official authorities work at all, beyond the occasional local SEE / SEE ALSO reference in our own catalog. So, no ambulance chasing for me. :(

I have an author with a numeral on the end of his name: (Christy G.) Turner II

He is listed in the "I"s instead of the "T"s .

How should that be entered to get him in the right place ? I tried several ways and it still puts him in the "I"s.

I should give up my burial location finder -

http://www.findagrave.com/index.html

It also gives up info when ashes are scattered - which I believes makes people zombie-proof!

ETA - Like today - one of our "died on this days" - I found his burial location:

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=17832710

>108 FicusFan::
As far as I can tell it ought to work if you enter it as either "Turner II, Christy G." or "Turner, Christy G., II" (the latter will show a comma after the Turner, though). Is one of those what you're doing?

I have tried Turner II, and even taken the II out, but he still sorts in the "I"s.

I can make it look right with everything in the right order, but his name stays in the "I"s.

I just tried Turner, Christy G., II and it looks fine (adds the comma after Turner), but still sorts in the "I"s.

Odd. I can't see why it would be browser-specific, but both methods sort correctly for me using Safari 3.2.1, although it sometimes requires one or two reloads.

Sneaky, sneaky - now there are comparisons - it's making me competitive!

:)

What should be done with same-name authors? I'm just ignoring them for now - what are others doing?

113:
Either you've got a miracle man handy, or someone needs to call the police.

>115 r.orrison: - Tee!

But my library is "mostly dead" - statistically:

71.74% dead. 80% of members have a higher percent-dead.

Some members with similar dead percents.

See!

You'd think the comparison would be with your connections (friends, interesting libraries, 50 similar) as well.

It looks like if you type anything at all in the date of death field, it shows up as dead. So even if you type "none" or "n/a," it moves the author from the unknown to the dead column. Couldn't we have some specific text we could enter in the date of birth or date of death fields when a living author's year or date of birth is not known?

Anyone know if this author's still around? http://www.librarything.com/author/chambersselmalola

118: Yeah, I've been wondering whether I should estimate birth dates -- could get pretty close using the years of academic degrees, for example. One of my Unknown authors is an LT author.

If the birth dates are estimates, would people put "circa" or "around" so that those dates aren't presumed accurate.

The instructions say put (?) after the date if uncertain, and I did so on one where I had a death date and age at death from an obituary but not a birth date. I'd maybe prefer (circa) or (est) or (estimated from ---), but maybe this could get too complicated and (?) is a good general solution.

In the dead and alive comparison, my ratios are reversed. It says 57.63 % dead, although a correct calculation yields 57.63 % alive.

#120 One of my Unknown authors is an LT author.

Maybe LT authors could be encouraged to fill in their birth year?

What language version(s) of the Common Knowledge are the data drawn from? My numbers of dead authors and living authors stay the same regardless of what language version of LT I'm using. (Well, I only tried English, Swedish, German, and French to be honest, but at least in those four cases the numbers were the same.) For the "not a person" count, however, the numbers differ between different languages.

It would be helpful if LT changed the "over 100 = dead" rule to, say, 120. Then one could put "20th century" in the birthdate field without the author automatically being counted as dead. I think this would solve lots of problems.

> 120

I've been wondering whether I should estimate birth dates -- could get pretty close using the years of academic degrees, . . .

Oh, I don't think so. That seems to me to invite inaccuracies.

124: Maybe LT authors could be encouraged to fill in their birth year?

Who would do the encouraging? And I can imagine authors not wishing to get dragged into CK.

127: Oh, I don't think so. That seems to me to invite inaccuracies.

Agreed, though with the ones I encountered today there was other supporting evidence. It'd be nice to narrow the range somehow.

I have a lot of authors that I know are alive (just talked with one of them yesterday) but I have no idea when they were born. I would love to be able to put something in the birth field that would default them to alive. I tried putting a birthdate of ?, but that flipped them into the dead column.

An estimate is among the samples given for the CK DOB field; that suggests to me that estimates are acceptable.

Still, I'm not going to guess that someone was born in ca. 1930 or c.1940. How would I know? How would they like being made potentially much older than they are? (Perhaps they wouldn't mind younger.) What's the point of putting information out there in the interwebs if it's blatantly not real, correct information?

P.S. I think allowing 20th century as an approx. DOB and DOD would work. If it's there, but there's no DOD, then the assumption would be that the person is alive. If there's something in the DOD field, however precise, the assumption is that they're dead.

I'm not suggesting that people should guess a person's birthdate at random. I'm saying that information known only approximately and/or without absolute certainty can still be useful. A NY Times obituary says Mr. X died on December 12, 2008, at the age of 84. That doesn't tell me for certain that he was born in 1924, but it does tell me that "c. 1924" is not an unreasonable thing to record in his DOB field. Knowing a person's graduating class gives similarly useful if approximate information.

Considering all the other compromises we make on LT (everyone named John Smith is the same person, everyone born in 1907 is dead, everyone for whom we have a birth date but not a death date is alive, etc.), this one doesn't seem to be out of line.

If they're dead, it's not so much of a big deal. The information in the DOD field will move them over to the right category, and I'm more ok with estimating birth years in those cases.

I'm more concerned with being able to move some of the living people in the unknown category into the alive category. For those authors I know, former or current professors and such, or people in my field, I don't care to go prying into their age. For many other authors, the birth years are simply not public.

> 133

A NY Times obituary says Mr. X died on December 12, 2008, at the age of 84. That doesn't tell me for certain that he was born in 1924, but it does tell me that "c. 1924" is not an unreasonable thing to record in his DOB field. Knowing a person's graduating class gives similarly useful if approximate information.

I agree with your first sentence, as that is simple math.

The second, however, is not so easily calculable. One would need to know a) when the person began her studies, b) how old she was at the time she matriculated, and c) how long it took her to get her degree(s). One cannot simply assume that everyone goes to college immediately from high school, and thence immediately to grad school, nor that everyone spends the same amount of time at these institutions.

>134 rsterling:

The second case has to do with a lack of certainty rather than with a lack of exactness. I claim we (reasonably) make use of uncertain information all the time. (Multiple examples provided upon request.) If Ms. Y graduated from high school in 1997, a claim that her DOB was "c. 1979" is not a claim that her DOB is absolutely certain to have been between 1978 and 1980 but that it was probably close to 1979. I claim that such information is better than no information at all.

I've found several high school graduation dates for authors for whom I can find no birthdate. I also agree that 'c. 1979' would be a good compromise in these instances.

I agree that you can't really use college or grad school graduation dates, but high school, while not /entirely/ standard, seems standard /enough/, given the other sorts of compromises listed above.

Going back to the comparison thing, which in my case reads:

39.04% alive. 84% of members have a higher alive percent.

Some members with similar dead percents.

...the English version reads as though it's been translated from some other language by a computer; what's it going to be like on the international sites? Couldn't we have something like "...similar percentage of living authors", please? :-)

It would be interesting to get an idea of who the people with very different percentages are, but I suppose there are going to be a lot of people with only one or two books clustered at 0 and 100%.

ETA: Just noticed yesterday's blog post on homophily - maybe we should avoid looking at the members with similar proportions of living and dead!

Even more fun: Sir Walter Scott has 3.32% alive (sorry: alive percent). Eleven writers who are either very long-lived, or have living namesakes.

There's a similar alive percentage for Thomas Jefferson...

For living authors where I don't know the birth date, I've been putting "yes" (as in, yes, they are alive) in the CK field and its been putting them in the alive category.

>141 lorin77: In this thread - http://www.librarything.com/topic/56690 - LT staffer conceptDawg asked that only dates be entered in the date fields. For authors where you might only know a very approximate date, you put in c. 1400.

>141 lorin77: - I tried that just now, and it moved my alive-and-kicking author to the Dead column. Not working for me. Which field did you put it in?

20th century puts people in the dead column.

142. Fine. 20th century is a date, as is c. 20th century, going from cD's example of c. 14th century. So why won't that work in the DOB field to mark someone as alive?

Has anyone tried 21st century, to see if that works?

145: I think it's the "more than 100=dead" rule kicking in.

142: Shoot. How are we supposed to kick them over to the alive column if their birth dates are private?

> 147, 148

Tim said he was going to change it to "more than 120". He probably just hasn't had a chance yet.

>146 rsterling: 21st c. made the one I tried dead ;-(

It's funny the older the author is the more likely I can find their birth date in a public forum. The magic number seems to be 50. People in their 30's-40's seem to be the less likely to give it out.

148>

I would guess that "20th century" is getting parsed as "20".

Try "c. 1960" or similar.

c. 1960 will put someone in the dead category. I tried it with Sarah Susanka, who was born c. 1957 (how specifically non-specific).

>153 yue:

I've got 4 authors with birthdate "c. 1960" in the alive category.

Really? Hmm. I will have to try again.

>155 yue:

It looks like what didn't work for Sarah Susanka was "c. 1950-1960".

I tried that initially because I didn't really want to put in an estimate that was so specific. I just put in c. 1960 and it did work. I am somewhat surprised because the examples have an estimate, so I thought it would work, but then, the estimate was for someone who is most certainly dead.

I'd still love to know how to bring Susan Blackmore (born 1951-07-29) into the land of the living.

156> Did you try putting spaces around the dash? Perhaps the algorithm isn't seeing 1950-1960 as a number.

>158 cpg:

Her date of birth was given as "29 juillet 1951" on the French site, which seemed to muck up the works. I just changed it to 1951-07-29 and she's back in the land of the living.

Apparently all versions of CK are counted.

Could we have a way of indicating names which are shared by two or more writers? It would be tidier if this group could be separated from the singleton 'unknowns' who are simply waiting for data.

>160 Scorbet:

Thanks!

161>

That's something that's been sought for years, for reasons far more sweeping than just getting them out of the "Unknown" column on a new toy feature.

(There are ways of indicating shared names, the primary ones being the disambiguation notice and the ongoing threads collecting instances on the Combiners group, but those are for human consumption, not automatic use, and it sounds like you want an automatic way to whisk them into an "Ambiguous name" column. There are plenty of cases where individual authors do have something in the disambiguation notice column (usually along the lines of "Joe T. Author is not the same person as Joe Author without the middle initial. Do not combine them."), so just checking whether that column is populated doesn't work.

>163 lorax:
That's something that's been sought for years, for reasons far more sweeping than just getting them out of the "Unknown" column on a new toy feature.

Yes - obviously! I can't wait to be able to split up some of the synonymous authors in my library but I presume that would require some rather major programming. We have been given this 'toy', as you put it, to play with (to encourage more CK data entry, perhaps??) and ambiguous authors rule themselves out. I know little or nothing about writing programs as my suggestion may reveal, but I wondered if the addition of an 'ambiguous name - Y/N' box in CK would be a simple way of dealing with this particular - and, OK, trivial - problem.

Tim said that the new "Author of ..." bit at the top of the author pages was a precursor of separation of authors.

164> And it would be an easy way to locate all the ambiguous author pages once the disambiguate author feature was rolled out (I know that there is a talk thread for this but a field on the author page would be even better).

>163 lorax:,164

I would like to get some kind of consensus on what to do with them - I really want to eliminate that "unknown" column, and I'm sure a lot of them are multiple authors with one name. And I keep looking them up over and over, not remembering who I've already checked! Because of that, I'm kind of in favor of marking their gender as N/A - since it's certainly not a single "person", and that will put them in the "not a person" category. At least one of my names represents a female and male with the same name, too.

>167 timepiece:

While I appreciate all of the hard work everyone has put in, I think it may be overly zealous to try and eliminate every member of the "unknown" category, especially if it leads to bad data, further down the line.

>167 timepiece: I share your concern about the mass of 'unknowns' - in my library there are two more unknowns than the dead and alive added together - which is why I made the suggestion above. I would, however, be sorry to muddle the 'not a person' category as a list of organisations which have assumed the mantle of authorship.

Gah! Please don't deliberately wrong data just to clear out the unknown column! What happens when/if we finally get proper disambiguation (and Tim has said that the "author of" field is an indication of real disambig to come)? -- that'll just mean fixing it all again.

(In fact, leave them unknown, and that list will become a far more complete and accessible way to get a list of ambiguously-named authors than all of our long threads on the subject could ever be, should we ever have a shot at fixing it.)

>170 sabreuse: Looking at my list of unknowns, my impression is that most of them are rather obscure (single)authors whose birthdates are hard to find, rather than ambiguous names, but as you say, the list is a pointer to the ambiguous.

There has been a lot of discussion about estimating the DoB and entering it as c.1950 or whatever. I think I'm with what seems to be your view that no data is better than wrong data so I'm holding off guessing. Someone's suggestion of the LoC site - authorities.loc.gov - as a source of birthdates looks promising.

Yeah, I'm running about 50% looking at authorities.loc.gov -- it's not perfect, but then I'm not looking there first, so these are people I haven't been able to find in places with faster and less clunky searches. Given that this has included some real obscurities, I feel like I'm finding a lot more than I necessarily expected.

>>171 abbottthomas:,172 I'm running about 50% looking at authorities.loc.gov

I've found checking WorldCat is simpler if the books by an author have ISBNs. (1) open a work page (2) Click on WorldCat on top right corner (3) Click on 'details' on menu line center page (4) click on author name. Four clicks.

Sometimes all you get is a date range books by the author are published, so watch out, but a surprisingly number of times you get a birth date for a name ( I wouldn't say 50% of the time but it's fast enough to check before trying google).

>173 kathrynnd: - good tip! Since I haven't been focusing on work pages while working on Dead or Alive, I've tended to forget about the Worldcat option. I'm sadly out-of-sight-out-of-mind.

Tim created a solution for living people with nonspecific info in the DOB: http://www.librarything.com/topic/56585#1056021

A note for those thinking of asking LT Authors to supply their dates of birth - you may get "Go away" in various degrees of politeness as your answer, and if you push when given such an answer you may be supplied with a deliberately wrong date. It's one of those pieces of data that's entirely too useful to identity thieves, plus many authors don't want a particular pen name to be linked with either their legal name or some other pen name they use, and accurate personal details are one of the ways such linking happens. (The latter is why I have not filled in several pieces of Common Knowledge I happen to know about the author of one recently acquired book).

>168 Katya0133:, 169, 170

I am not trying to put bad data in the system - I think that marking a multiple-person author as "not a person" is accurate, and helpful - we'll be able to more easily identify them later, when it becomes possible to separate them. It's not like I'm making up birthdates, or putting non-date data in the birthdate field. And I'm adding disambiguation notices that the entry represents multiple people.

>170 sabreuse:
leave them unknown, and that list will become a far more complete and accessible way to get a list of ambiguously-named authors

I disagree - I think marking them N/A is a better way to get a list - unknown just means no one has entered any data at all, and includes plenty of regular single-person authors. As far as I'm concerned, unknown means "no one has looked at this one yet". At least with a name marked N/A, you know that someone looked at it and made a decision that it was not a single-person name.

Maybe we can talk Tim into putting another option in the gender field.

Something like "Multi-person" or "Multi-Author".

This might also help member remember that this author is actually several authors.

Just an off the wall thought.

How about if we change "n/a" to "not a person"?

"Not an individual"?
"Not a specific person"?

179>

That would be OK with me.

180>

Changing "n/a" to ether of those would be a bad idea.

>180 r.orrison:

Because why?

I like the idea behind the suggestion in #178. Perhaps that can be implemented, even if not in the form of a fifth radio button.

I have to admit, I really like the suggestion in 178 as well, though I think we're irritating Tim with more and more options for gender. But it does seem like a good place to unequivocally mark an entry as "multiple people". As opposed to the presence of text in the disambiguation field, which is sometimes present on a single author, to prevent combining.

Or maybe he could just change N/A to "corporate author/organization/multiple people" so everyone could know to use it that way.

To make it slightly clearer that the n/a choice is the appropriate choice for collaborations or ambiguous entries.

I'm assuming thinking along the lines of "John Smith that wrote Foo is a person, and John Smith that wrote Bar is a person, so John Smith is a person."

N/a is fine for a Gender field but Corporate Author and Multi-Person don't really fit. What is needed is a new Type field that describes the type of entity in the Author record. It could be Corporate/Organization, Multiple Authors, something that means a name that multiple authors wrote under. Pseudonym might fit here as well.

Collaborative Pseudonym?

Hydra?

Hydra. Definitely Hydra.

Like I said in my original post (178), my idea was just off the wall and now I think maybe I should of not posted it.

Oh well.

Maybe instead of the current 3rd choice of "other/contested/unknown" or as a 5th choice, have it say "see Disambiguation notice". I think that would be better than my previous suggestion.

190>

Maybe instead of the current 3rd choice of "other/contested/unknown"

You're kidding, right?

Do you know how hard we had to beg and how long we had to wait to get that option there? And now you want to get rid of it, again leaving us with no place for people who don't identify as male or female, just because you can't wait for author disambiguation to move some people off your "Unknown" list?

That's just....unbelievable.

191>

Wow, I really don't know how to respond to your comment.

>177 timepiece:

The problem with marking ambiguous names as "N/A" is that you don't actually know what's going to happen with the Common Knowledge data once the authors are separated. Maybe the info already entered will stick with the "primary" author (e.g., the "Dan Brown" of "The Da Vinci Code" and not "Dan Brown," the poet), in which case it will be bad information.

>193 Katya0133:

Isn't it better to have no CK data for a synonymous author page? Except the disambiguation statement, of course.

192>

How about "Sorry, that was a bad suggestion?"

>194 abbottthomas:

Well, it depends on what will happen after the combined authors get "exploded," but I assume so, yes. (Depending on the degree to which the authors are synonymous. If, I don't know, 80% of the works listed on the page are by one author, I think it's fine to have CK info for that one person, even if you know that one or more other minor authors are also in there.)

Have to back up lorax here. Many many people pushed long and hard for that change, and it is NOT a good idea to get rid of it.

195>

Having thought about that for awhile, my response is "Not a chance in Hades".

Check your information before jumping to conclusions.

I have two authors on my "Unknown" list and my suggestion that you jumped all over was just one of two thoughts.

Could we please keep this discussion civil? Lorax and Heather: Mercenary_Roadie suggested either eliminating "other/contested/unknown" or adding a fifth option. Mercenary_Roadie may not have known how hard you worked to get that option (I didn't).
I agree: elimination is not a good idea. However, adding the fifth option may cause some people about to add erroneous data to stop and check the disambiguation notice.
Incidentally, I do think post #178 is worthwhile. The author group CLAMP is multiple people (though all women) and Franklin W. Dixon is an umbrella pseudonym for all the authors who write Hardy Boys books.

(I know I sound like a jerk in this post, but tempers were flaring over something which could have easily been diffused.)

I was thinking about this on the way to work this morning - the problem is that we are using one status - gender (which may be ambiguous) to then determine another status - whether an entity qualifies for "aliveness" (which may be ambiguous).

We are basically saying that only individual persons qualify for an "aliveness" status (Dead/Alive) and so for entries that are NOT individual persons we want to remove them from the running for "Dead/Alive." The problem is that there are several reasons that an "author" entry may not be an individual person:

1. The author is an Organization/Entity - a clear candidate for N/A
i.e. NASA

2. The author is actually one of several actual authors (individual persons) that are writing under a "Collaborative Pseudonym"
i.e. George Durston or Frank Dixon - N/A because there may be male/female/other gendered authors that wrote under that pseudonym

3. The author page contains works by several "identically named authors" -
see the "Master List"
Part I:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/4897
Part II:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/8136
Hypothetical example -
Lee Smith (female, alive - writes investment books)
Lee Smith (male, dead - wrote bad poetry)
Lee Smith (other, unknown - wrote a biographical documentary on their experiences as a pre-operative transgendered person - with a sequel documenting their post-operative life)
- all show up on the "Lee Smith" author page - so any CK added for Gender/DOB/DOD - would only apply to one and not the others - so until the "Identically Named Author" issue is resolved (which I understand is on the drawing board) - we would have to N/A them - even though each individually would qualify for a different category. (Or leave the gender field blank - but some of us are OCD...)

So the question is how to best resolve this without breaking anything -

I would keep the current gender options:
1. Female
2. Male
3. Other/contested/unknown
4. N/A

...but then I would give the N/A option a sub-tier of "Why?"
- Organization/Group
- Multiple Authors/ Collaborative Pseudonym/ Author mashes
- Indentically Named Authors
- blank (or, No Reason Given)

The blank/No Reason Given is what all of the current n/a's would default to so that people wouldn't have to go back and re-enter "N/A" CK. The Identically Named Authors would identify those entries that would be resolved when a fix for the Identically Named Authors issue is pushed (at which time that option could disappear) - added bonus - we then have an "official" list to supplement the one in the threads above (which some folk may not know about).

The Dead/Alive page could then show us:
Dead
Alive
N/A (with subgroup)
- no reason given (so I can go back and give a reason)
"Zombies" (no idea what this is since I don't seem to have any)

I don't always agree with you, Portia - although I do in this case - but I so appreciate your thoughtful, well-reasoned and thoroughly explained answers.

Thank you MerryMary! I often read the forums in the AM and ponder them on the way to and from work so I find that when I get home I tend to have some organized thoughts/opinions on a given subject, so I post them...

I don't always agree with you, Portia..
Well, thank goodness! What fun is a conversation if everyone has the same thoughts/opinions/ideas? - a pretty bland world THAT would be... So disagree away!

PortiaLong
Motto: "Please feel free to change my mind."
(Hmmm...I think I'll go add that to my profile...)

>199 yue:
Well said, yue.

200> Actually, I disagree. You are conflating two things, gender and aliveness, in one field. Since there has to be work on the part of the LT developers to add the sub-tier of why, I think it would be better to apply that work to an entirely new field to describe the type of the "author".

>204 jjwilson61: Yes, gender and aliveness are not strictly related, but if gender is not applicable, there must be a reason why and if they aren't a person (and therefore have no gender) they can't be alive or dead. In any event, aliveness is also determined by DOB and DOD.
Perhaps the option to select an author type of "organizational" or "multiple people" removed the possibility of gender, and/or automatically input a value of "n/a" in the gender field. This may be a better option, but it requires another CK field which would only be relevant to a handful of authors.
One thing which could help clear up a handful of authors would be the ability to distinguish between identically named authors, but when/if that happens gender, aliveness, etc. is going to be the last thing on my mind.

Edited for clarity.

198>

Yes, it was one of two suggestions.

It was a horrible suggestion, which is why I jumped on it -- I didn't have any problem with the second one, which is why I didn't jump on it.

Maybe the coffee just hasn't kicked in yet, but I don't see how having two unknowns has anything to do with the badness of a suggestion to return androgynous folks to second-class status again. Can you clarify?

205> Well, for one thing, if the author isn't a person than a lot of the other fields don't apply as well. Why single out the gender field as the one that gets the n/a.

"gender" is singular - everything in the CK is meant to describe an individual or an organization, singular. It's not designed to handle people, plural.

Multiple people - n/a

Sucks that it's the way that it is, but it is what it is. Disambiguate away and you're done. This is a loooooooong tail.

Really, this is not the "everything to everyone field of gender and togetherness and type of organization and partnernship and club and programming limitation and forthcoming feature and nitpickery field." It's no insult to go n/a to these. The rest of CK will reveal what kind of n/a we're discussing, especially if one utilizes brief bio.

To sort of quote Mick Jaggar, "you can't always get what you want, but some times, you just might find, you get what you need."

>204 jjwilson61:

I do not feel that I, personally, am conflating two things - I am pointing out that RIGHT NOW the system is conflating two things by looking at the "gender" to determine whether an "author" is a candidate for the "dead/alive" designation - such as I outlined in the first paragraph.

I was discussing ways of tweaking the CURRENT system to further disambiguate matters without introducing a change that would negate the work that has already been done by those that have been assiduously n/a'ing non-individual-people "Authors." (And give us an official "Identically Named Authors" list - for when there is a fix for that in the making...an ulterior motive.)

Certainly it would be lovely to be able to select a "type" of author and have the CK fields be appropriate to that "type" (Just as I have been begging for some time for the option to select a "type" of work - periodical, anthology, short story, etc - and have the data entry fields appropriate to that "type").

But I would think that creating a "sub-n/a" field for CK would be less of a hassle (development-wise) than adding "an entirely new field" that would then frame what other fields would be active/applicable on the page (of course, I might be completely off base - knowing NOTHING about computers...).

>208 stephmo:
Of course you are correct - disambiguate away. I never would have even contemplated breaking down n/a further except that another LT feature is hinging on this to generate candidacy for dead/alive status.

Kind of gives short shrift to those "identically named authors" for which all the CK would apply if only we could do it - an ulterior motive to my suggestion was to generate a statistic that would SHOW the extent of the issue. (I.E. - You have 234 dead authors, 256 dead authors, 356 authors that are not individual people, and 88 individual authors that are either dead or alive but we can't tell you because LT doesn't distinguish which individual person you are referring to.)

So, I think we need a "type of author" field. That is the right answer. Options:

1. A distinct person
2. A few disrtict people
3. A corporate body
4. Unknown

Agreed?

A distinct person
A few distinct people
A corporate body
Multiple people using the same penname/psuedonym
Unknown

Yes! Awesomeness...

1. A distinct person - gender fields apply (can get rid of n/a?), can be "alive" or "dead" (or "unknown")

2. A few distinct people - Collaborative Pseudonyms and "Mashed Authors"
(gender greyed out and no dead/alive status)

3. A corporate body - groups, organizations, clubs, publishers, et
(gender greyed out and no dead/alive status)

4. Unknown - the stupid author that I was forced to enter for this book:
http://www.librarything.com/work/6176772
because I can't find out anything about the book and there is NOTHING else resembling an author on the cover/title page etc.

- Do Identically Named Authors go here? Or is the problem going to become moot in the near future?

I feel like this isn't the right place to introduce pseudonymity.

So what do you do with an "author" like
George Durston?

"They" are a psuedonym of "a few distinct people" - or do you want them as "Unknown"?

Ouch. God, I dunno.

or -
http://www.librarything.com/author/dixonfranklinw
and
http://www.librarything.com/author/pythonmonty
same type of scenario.

I guess I don't see a point in subdividing it further if you aren't going to include these in the "a few distinct people" category. In which case I would just have two -

1. A distinct person - gender and dead/alive apply
2. NOT a distinct person (may be group, collaborators, Identically Named Authors or unknown) - then we are kind of back where we started (although we have at least moved the criteria off of the gender field)

Personally, I would consider collaborative pseudonyms to be in the same category as organizations and corporate authors - they are going to have the same body of work, as opposed to the identically named authors, who do not.

And no one has mentioned - this whole thing (Dead or Alive, not the gender debate) has made the On This Day module so much better! I hardly ever see authors repeated now.

I love the idea of having a "type of author" field.

I would suggest something like:

1. Actual distinct person
2. Corporate author
(2a collaborative pseudonym)
3. In need of disambiguation
4. Unknown or other

I actually think of people like Carolyn Keene and Victor Appleton as corporate authors - since that's basically what they are - though some of them do have very distinct gender even if they aren't a single person. Authors like Sandy Schofield (a husband-wife team) and Ann M. Martin (who is both a real person and a corporate pseudonym) are harder, though.

Authors with two people in the author field, or several authors with the same name, and similar, would go in category 3 (for easier fixing once we can fix it) and 4 would include everything else, including authors like me and Anonymous.

I do think it should distinguish between multiple-person authors that are intentional (like collaborative pseuds) and multiple-person authors that should be separate, though.

>209 PortiaLong: On a side note, Portia, I hadn't ever heard of the idea of work type - it sounds delightful. Could we get that at the same time as work-level canonical author?

>219 melannen: We wouldn't have to make the distinction (in author type) between multiple-person authors (collaborative pseudonyms, etc.) and identically named authors when/if we get the ability to distinguish between identically named authors. (Does that make sense? It does to me, but then, I wrote it.)
Perhaps I should say that if we had the ability to distinguish between identically named authors, there would be no author page covering multiple people who were not intentionally working together/as the same person. (Does this make anymore sense? Sigh.)

I'm not into lumping all non-distinct persons into "corporate author." The Red Cross or the Congress of the United States are corporate authors. They aren't a bunch of distinct people, but an organization that uses the organization as its authorial name. Over time, a corporate author will change in composition, but maintain its corporate name. A book that has as it's author "Milton and Rose Friedman" is something else. Maybe it's ratty data, but it's something other than "corporate author."

My problem with "collaborative pseudonym" is that it needs what librarians call "scope notes." Nobody is going to know what it means unless it's explained. I want to avoid that sort of thing on LT.

Tim -

Ah, "collaborative pseudonym"... Sorry, I don't want you to use the phrase anywhere - it came up in this thread and stuck in my head.

I'm just going to want to eventually know which "type" this particular kind of author entry belongs under - since they are not distinct individuals, not a group/organization (what you are calling "corporate author" which apparently needs its own "scope notes") and I don't like "Unknown" (since I do know) SO think that it would be in the "several distinct people" realm - along with other types of collaborators. (You can think of the several distinct people that write under the name that I was calling "collaborative pseudonym" as having collaborated on series rather than works.)

If we are not going to haved the "Identically Named Authors" issue fixed imminently you could have a separate "type" for THAT which could disappear when the issue was resolved.

How about -
1. Individual Author (a distinct person)
2. Organizational Author (a corporation, group, etc - Red Cross, NASA, Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Publishers)
3. Collaborators (a few/several distinct people collaborating on works or series - Milton and Rose Friedman, Monty Python, George Durston)
4. Identically Named Authors (to be gotten rid of by a future improvement)
5. Unknown (Various, Anonymous, needing disambiguation.

Since the vast majority of LT "authors" are Individual Authors - you could leave the page the way it is (except you could remove n/a from gender?) and put a button at the top "NOT an individual author" which gives you the other options to choose from.

222: "Identically Named Authors (to be gotten rid of by a future improvement)

Read the blog :)

SUPER! Thank you SO much.

(PS. I will stop editing my 222 post now that you have read it)

PortiaLong rushes off for some author "splitting" - fun, fun fun!

**PortiaLong pauses and reflects - "Perhaps Tim pushed this just to distract me...

- you're not off the hook for the "Author type" Identically Named Authors though - until you can add CK for each "split"

222 is basically what tim suggested back in 211. I liked it, and was going to suggest some minor tweaks, but ....

The more I think about it the more I think we just need two and a lump category: "Individual" and "Collaboration" and "unknown or n/a". Collaboration is used for organizations, series ghostwriters ("Franklin W. Dixon"), and joint pseudonyms ("Stephen Bury").

It doesn't seem like there's any point, really, in breaking out all the variant types of collaborations right now. We're not tracking relevant information about collaboratives in separate fields, such as which individuals are involved, or any other information. (We describe collaborative information in the human-readable disambiguation paragraphs, but that's not easily reduced to simplistic options like check-offs or multiple choices -- as we have figured out here.)

So, all the author information fields we currently have pretty much relate to discrete individuals -- not collaborations/corporations/whatever. In fact, our current need (and conversation topic) pretty much makes this clear: We all need to futz with the individuals who have or have not died, and we all need some way to distinguish them from non-individuals.

So, individuals and non-individuals (or collaborations) are all we need. (And of course the lump category: unknown or n/a)

There's also a good reason not to do break collaborations down into the various sub-kinds of collaborations: There are lots of different kinds of collaborations and we can argue endlessly over how to break them down. This will inevitably lead both to proliferating instructions and to mis-classifications, all in an attempt to simply complex relationships into simple check-off style options.

But the "disambiguation" field that we use now means we don't have to simply the complex relationships into simple check-off style options. With the new author separation, we can eliminate a major source of disambiguations -- multiple unrelated people who happen to have the same name. And thus this field can just focus on explaining the nature of the relationship between the related people. And that's really all we need, until we get some kind of system that lets us interrelate one author to the author.

Finally! My "Unknown" column is shorter than both my "Dead" and my "Alive" columns...for now :(

> 226

wanna take a crack at mine? I'm dead split 272/272 alive/dead, but stymied with 962 unknown. I know some of them are definitely alive, but no birth dates to be found. I've stuck c. 19something (not literally "something;" mostly c. 1950 'cause the ones I know are usually close to my age) in a few, but it feels ... uncomfortable. Maybe I've caught the lorax aversion to imperfect data.

I haven't felt very well today so I've spent basically my entire day in bed with my laptop, going through my 'Unknown' list adding birth/death dates where I can find them, gender, website links, and other CK stuff. Not to mention all of the combining I've found that needed to be done in my unknown authors. Serious, serious time sink, Tim. I could have been reading!

But actually a lot of fun, in an OCDC sort of way.

>in an OCDC sort of way.

Is that a conflation of "OCD" and "OCLC"? Because if so, I love it.

Plus a little AC/DC thrown in!

For those about to catalog . . .

In looking at my Not a Person it says I have 4.

There is the number in parenthesis and then underneath 4 black bullets.

The are listed:

Anonymous
Alex Archer
{Empty Space}
Carolyn Keene

So what is with the empty space ? Who is that supposed to be ? I don't have an empty space on any of the author lists ?

http://www.librarything.com/profile/FicusFan/memes/deadoralive

Oh, and Christy G. Turner, II is still sorting in the letter Is in the Unknown column

I think if you get rid of the comma between Turner and II it will get Christy out of the I's.

233> I had a blank author in my Dead/Alive (or maybe Male/Female) list as of yesterday. (And none in my catalog.) It doesn't seem to be there today. That said, I use IE6 at home and IE7 at work, so I'll check again when I get home and see if it reappears.

#234, nope (see 110-111). Even if I take the 'II' off it still sorts in the Is. I played around with it a lot to see what would make it change, and it doesn't move.

#236: Seems to be sorting OK now. k4k

#237, not for me. Turner is still in the Is in the unknown column and not in the Ts where he belongs.

I've just combined your Christy G. Turner, II with the others, but he(she?)'s still sorting in the Is. The URL for the combined author is /author/iichristygturner, so I'm guessing that for some reason the system thinks II is her(his?) last name and is sorting by that.

Edited to fix spelling.

I got rid of the comma in the Canonical Name field, but that's still not re-sorting her. Not sure what the problem is; perhaps the sort order is not based on something we can change.

ETA - Aha, I think rorrison has pegged it - it's sorting on the URL version of the name.

Christy = His.

I know I played around with the Canonical name too. Didn't make a difference. I did fix some other authors and they resorted properly, but can't make him move.

The format should be "Turner, Christy G., II" - check the CK help page. Not that it makes this particular case work any better...

I did check the CK gender on his page, and it was blank. I've filled it in -- thanks!

Well my not a person is down to 3. Unfortunately the blank space is still one of them. Carolyn Keene is missing, so I suspect someone changed them to female from N/A.

Check now.

Cool. Carolyn is back, and my blank space became John Case.

Thanks.

I didn't do anything with Carolyn, but for John Case I looked at the HTML for the page, and sure enough there was a link to his page, but with no text. Someone had added a Canonical Name, and then someone else deleted it, which triggered a known bug leaving his name blank. I just put the Canonical Name back.

FicusFan: Yunno, as much as I love Nancy Drew books, I'm kind of surprised that I had no idea males had written under that name too. Learn something new every day, I guess!

I only have 1 or 2 of her books. I just heard about the whole mob through people in my mystery book group. We did one month with a Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys read.

If an author is alive, appears to be younger than 108, and has no birth listed in WorldCat, Wikipedia, Library of Congress is it reasonable to put date of birth as "c. 1900" or leave dob blank?

I've been putting 20th century on some authors that I know are alive, but can't find actual dates for. I've been emailing authors asking for their birth year, and have had very positive results so far. When I get an actual date, I just update the 20th century.

So you are literal entering "20th century"?

Yes, just as I would put 3rd century if appropriate. Do you think it should include CE?

I have followed a suggestion elsewhere and put c. 1900 (20th century) instead.