black hole work?

Is this a new black-hole work?
http://www.librarything.com/work/9191770

It seems to have no title, but the reviews suggest that a bunch of different works are combined into it. One edition at least is definitely a spam work (see the most recent review). It's not possible to view the editions to see what's there, though. There's an error message:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 41943040 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 524288 bytes) in /var/www/html/inc_normalization.php on line 475

Well I managed to get to the editions page, there certainly are a lot of odd works combined here and a lot of suggested combinations which are incorrect. I was about to seperate out this one "The Internet Marketing and Personal Development Blog of David Stirzaker / David Stirzaker (1 copy separate)" which is the last one reviewed but I decided to leave the work until TPTB have had a chance to look at it.

Interesting. Investigating.

Hmm. Nothing special about the work number--not a limit number for a particular field, for example.

It looks to me like it's happening because of imports somehow.

Yeah, almost all of them have a title of "" and author of "". They do appear to have ISBNs, though. That's what's causing things to combine into it. My guess is that Goodreads changed its export--either to screw us up or coincidentally. So field X is no longer X, but some other value.

I'll ask Mike to look at it.

Bump.

I recognize that cover from the previous discussion of the issue, and that one definitely had books coming from other places as well, not just goodreads. Any books without title and author get put there. I'll see if I can dredge up the previous thread.

Ah, here we go. Casey was looking into it here, so it's been happening at least since November.

Edited to add: I separated a few more books out of this one since having Jane Eyre and a book by Charles Dickens show up on the combinations page there gave me the willies. So now this has an associated author, but that's just whoever wins out among the handful of attached books with an author -- this has been down to a single work with title/author (I've never dared drop below that point lest the work become totally inaccessible) before, with different authors each time.

And if you want some specific instances of the no title, no author books, this user has several (found from the reviews page):

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/1204004kazuki/yourlibrary

All added yesterday via "manual entry" (presumably meaning the universal importer).

Also, this user has only one book, with no title and no author, that's lumped in here, added in September (if that helps date the issue), and their connections list might be useful in finding more instances.

Bump. More users are reporting this here, it is not solved yet.

Bump. Still a problem, books are showing up here that were added today (examples here: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/madcolawlibrary/yourlibrary)

Bump. New report here.

Bump. Bad data in the database, sigh.

Bump. New report here.

Now there are no editions showing up for this work at all. Wouldn't it be better to rename the book "No Title," so people will understand what it is when they encounter it?

I'd favour calling it 'Please edit this book to enter a title and author'

13>

Now there are no editions showing up for this work at all.

Yes, that happens a lot. When editions show up, they can be separated out, but the vast majority of books that get eaten don't show up as editions.

14>

That's not a bad idea; I had naively hoped that after several staff members expressed interest in the problem it might be fixed or at least explained, but since it looks like we're stuck with it for the indefinite future, having a title that helps members rather than developers isn't a bad idea. I had already had full details in the Disambiguation Notice, but people might not always look there.

Looks like another new report : http://www.librarything.com/topic/95647

Due to someone separating the black hole from itself, this now has a new work number:

http://www.librarything.com/work/10255142

The original "919" number currently redirects there as well but I don't know for how long that will continue.

More data on the No Title, No Author books:

If you have a Book club edition, adding the book via ISBN might (but does not always) add the book without title or author. It happened to me this afternoon twice. Instead of allowing the erroneous entry to be added to my catalog, I deleted the book with no title or author and went back to add books.

Using the title and author to retrieve information brought up other editions of the same works, which I then added and changed to be the hard cover book club editions I actually own as opposed to mass market paperback editions of those works.

My third book club edition that I added this same afternoon was correctly brought up by entering the ISBN. So, a tip to those reading this thread. Try entering your book club editions by title and author first. After they are added to your catalog, then you can add the ISBN... if you wish and assuming it's correct.

Don't always expect the ISBN to be correct. Last week, on entering a review copy of a book given to me by the author, the ISBN I was given to believe was associated with the book I received brought up another book by another author entirely... which was originally combined with that black hole. The book combined into the black hole was NOT the same title as the book I received.

Using what as a source?

I tried several sources. Amazon.com, Overcat, Library of Congress. LC was the only source that actually claimed to have no information on the works. Overcat and Amazon both gave me some type of no title, no author entry.

17 members are currently reading the black hole work!

Their eyes will get sucked out!

Wasn't aware of this thread and posted a Bug report re: 21>

For reference, it's here:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/96906&newpost=1#lastmsg

Thanks to sqdancer for helping me navigate, don't want to wander into that event horizon ....

&norefer=1 is your friend.

Or were you talking about something else entirely?

This has nothing whatsoever to do with &norefer. It has to do with all works with no title or author being sucked into a single place, with bugs with the import meaning works come through with no title or author in some cases, and with the staff being totally uninterested in fixing the problem.

But wouldn't you expect works with no title or author (or ISBN) to be autocombined? As soon as the members with those works add a title or author to it then it should uncombine again, so what's the problem? Does this have anything to do with zero-copy editions?

I'm not sure why people would put such mangled works in their Currently Reading collection, unless they were trying to add the books into that collection in the first place.

In any case, the bug here is the mangled imports, not that they get combined together, right?

Part of the problem is that some of the no title/author works do get combined with others that have title and author - and then drag the good works into the black hole.

The Black Hole has moved again (this time not due to anything I did). It is now here: http://www.librarything.com/work/10328332

The old Black Hole (http://www.librarything.com/work/10255142) still features on 'What members are reading', but is now a zero copy work that has somehow taken on the name of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love.

Elric: The Stealer of Souls is now a black hole work. See:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/96817

http://www.librarything.com/work/8639896/members

http://www.librarything.com/profile/mccastro/stats/workdups

I think it was the original black hole work.

Oh man, that member's works aren't even available on the editions page to separate out (eta: mccastro).

Incidentally, I just tried to add something via the plus sign, to see how it works these days, and it gave me a no title work. Yet another reason to fix this and make it work with ISBNs...

Yet another reason to fix this and make it work with ISBNs

That wouldn't actually help a lot, because Amazon is returning no title/no author entries when it can't find the ISBN. Amazon.ca seems to be quite bad for that.

True, though I think that's a new thing, no? Seems a good idea to fix it so that when nothing - or a blank work - is found, nothing is added.

I know that nobody's going to fix the underlying bug, but I did want to point out that EarlyReviewers now has several copies of this "work".

33. I agree. Adding a no-title, no author work is rather useless.

It used to be when nothing was found, we got a "not found" rather than a no title, no author "work".

I'm not sure if this is a new black hole or not but I just stumbled onto it.

Hey. We figured this out. For some reason, Amazon changed it's API in a subtle but very obnoxious way. Previously when there were no results for something, they returned no "results" at all. Now the Amazon API returns one result—a completely empty result (That is, they previously returned XML->Items and now they returned XML->Items->Item but the Item has no title or author). Because we count results this made "no results" turn into "one result." The system didn't have special alarm bells for records that lacked all data because Amazon records always have data. (Live and learn.)

Normal users rarely entered such blank works, but the import queue LOVED them--suddenly everything was found!

This is going to take a while to fix. Basically, the books are all going to be removed. They REALLY don't exist--not on LT, or on Amazon--it's not just some problem moving good data around. Once this is done, the hole will much smaller--confined to books that users somehow combined with a no-title/no-author book, or whatever.

I'm going to be working on whether I should re-run the queue for these.

I can't say I understand everything, and things always sound simple in retrospect, but >37 timspalding: sounds like a major accomplishment.

That does sound like progress in both diagnosis and cure, but then I'm still confused about this other book-eating work, Elric: Stealer of Souls, since the books that have got combined into it do have data and do exist.

See the all the duplicated names in the "all members" to see whose libraries have gotten eaten by the soul-stealer:
http://www.librarything.com/work/8639896/members

If anyone thinks they've got a problem with black hole works, just be thankful that your catalogue doesn't look like this user's!

!!!!

Note how they're add dated on Dec 1, 2008.

Yeah, looks like something went wrong with some bulk import there.

I was yanking out some recent garnishings of the Black Hole. As a result, the work http://www.librarything.com/work/10328332 seems to have abandoned Thomas P. McCarthy CSV, who long was the front person for the oddity. Now the work seems to be with Barbara Berger, although the work doesn't show on her author page.

Sorry about messing things up again.

>45 ari.joki:
I have located the Black Hole Work's new lair:

http://www.librarything.com/work/10380966

27k copies. *sigh* I remember when it was a lowly 10k copies back in the good old days....

37>

Thank you, Tim. That's great news.

The (?) black hole now resides at http://www.librarything.com/work/10532054 and is still accreting new material. The cout was 27835 before I separated two slightly identifiable items from it, then the work jumped and now the count is 27800.

The count is now 28,169 :-(

(Correction, 28,151 after separating 3 or 4 indentifiable copies - so the count apparently isn't all that reliable either).

Current black hole :

https://www.librarything.com/work/16175226/

Edit : May have now migrated to one of the works that could be separated from it.

https://www.librarything.com/work/23641284/editions

This was recently taken apart, but member count remains weird and it is attracting new editions.

See https://www.librarything.com/topic/313277

https://www.librarything.com/work/22010017

No editions, nearly 13,000 members.

Almost everything I separated out was in German.

Another black hole work: https://www.librarything.com/work/26685231

Posted about here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/333100.

Another black hole work posted about here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/333519.

>56 kristilabrie: https://www.librarything.com/work/25628304

I've deleted the copy from my catalogue.

Here's another one:
https://www.librarything.com/work/8181471/

>58 leselotte: That's actually not a black hole work.
It's a combination of 600 works of a single user:
https://www.librarything.com/catalog/snagadeal&deepsearch=zshop