Uncombining authors

16 people have attributed Walking on Glass to Ian Banks rather than Iain Banks. How can I separate that one work from Ian and give it to Iain?

We need more tools!

You'll have to leave (preferably private) profile messages to those 16 users and let them know that their author data for that book is incorrect. They might change it, or they might not. It's up to them, but hopefully the prospect of better social data will convince them to make the change.

Hmm. Can someone explain to me why sometimes LT links me to http://www.librarything.com/author/banksian&norefer=1 and at other times it links me to http://www.librarything.com/author/banksian

Both url's are the author page for Ian Banks, but the books are different (both wrong).

The difference is the magic &norefer=1. If I understand correctly this magic code shows you the un-combined version of the author.

However here it looks like there is a bug - the &norefer=1 entry includes a couple of books from Iain Banks and I cannot see why. Perhaps someone else can?

The trick to this is to combine the two authors, combine the book and then separate the authors. Now all of Walking on Glass is under Iain Banks and none of Ian Banks' other books.

No! Now one of the suggestions for combining with Iain Banks is Ian Banks, and how long do you think it will be before someone comes along and assumes it's a spelling error and combines the two? This is really not good combining practice.

Ah is that how you do it? Thank you. It still shows up on the '&norefer=1' version of Ian Banks though, as do The Business and Consider Phlebas. Bizarre, but normally so.

>6 nperrin:

It was already a suggestion for combining when I went to the author page, so there's not much I could do about that. You're welcome to uncombine them again.

{kathrynnd posting from edandkathy account}

I think LT looks at more than just the author name and title when combining titles in a work, and this explains why a suggestion for combining sticks.

I've separated The Hobbit by John Howe from the main Tolkien work twice in the past week, each time Howe was a suggested combination. I don't think it was the owner of the map folder that did the combining (the owner appears to be a serious Tolkien collector, and besides, the other John Howe map in the collection wasn't touched).

Today I had a thought. I have a boxed collectors' edition of the Hobbit in my family edandkathy library, the comment reads,

Collector's box includes: Full colour fold-out map of Wilderland by John Howe; booklet by Brian Sibley about the writing of the Hobbit; CD recording (1952) of J.R.R. reading Bilbo's encounter with Gollum.

All in one box, one ISBN number.

I can see someone wanting to enter each of these items in LT separately, just as I understand those who want to make separate entries for combined novels, etc. but under the current LT work system, this can only lead to problems, in this case I believe that LT automatically combined the two Hobbit titles, thinking they were one.

>9 edandkathy:

Yes, two hours ago I reseparated John Howe from J.R.R. Tolkien, but I though it had been another fluke like Philip Mansel (why do people keep combining him?).

The thing I mentioned in message 5 is what I've been using for a couple of books under the name tolkien, but once in a while it's recombined with the others. So it really only works if you keep an eye on the author list on a daily basis.

>10 jmillar: Searching for the author Philip Mansel, (instead of using the touchstone), brings up the full &norefer=1 list of books associated in some way with Mansel. No I don't really understand the difference either, except as I said in msg 9, LT seems to use more than just author name and title in work combinations.

http://www.librarything.com/author/manselphilip&norefer=1

The title at the top of the list is The return of the king

Why? I would like to know too, but it appears to be a LT tangle. Could Mansel be listed as an 'other' author? I'm not all that familiar with the Tolkien books, other than having them around the household.

Keep you eye on your Tolkien books, because I am more than likely to go along and separate them. I spent quite a bit of time separating out the Christopher Tolkien books this morning.

> 5

There's still 16 copies of walking on glass under Ian Banks, as well as the wasp factory. I do think we need a feature to separate one author into two, so we can recombine them in the right way. There's also BANKS , which combines a number of different Banks's. I see that the touchstone links BANKS to Iain Banks, that's not correct.

>12 xtien:

That's because someone uncombinded them again. I hope they do come up with a feature so it's easier to combine those books in the future.

Maybe the combine and separate functions should be restricted to members of this group. Then everybody can still combine and separate, but at least they are aware of discussions going on here.