Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

While doing some edits, I ran across the following GR member:

http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/16...

The best I can tell, this member is actually several people, based on shelves such as...

anw-currently-reading ‎(3)
dew-currently-reading ‎(6)
dmw-currently-reading ‎(2)
doe-currently--reading ‎(4)

The issue I have though, is that this "member" has added several DVD's and movies (and created shelves for them). They have also added several 'blank' editions of books.

I think someone needs to message them, but I feel that a note from a super-librarian or someone with a more 'official' status would be more appropriate in this case. (Or maybe you'll tell me I should let be)

>_<

I just realized I posted this in the Otis & Jessica folder without meaning to, but maybe they'll want to weigh in...

And rivka, ^that's exactly how felt when I found them. :S

I'll never quite get adding videos to Goodreads.

Anyway, checked out the user and ended up here. Lots of Disney vids for whoever wants to tackle getting rid of them ;)

Looking at their shelf...they have a video shelf with 336 videos. Ugh. Maybe this is one Otis and company can do some magic on so librarians don't have to go around deleting 300+ videos.

I'll delete as many as I have the patience for

Kristen wrote: "I'll delete as many as I have the patience for"

count me in

I am going to try this technique - I am going to combine many of the dvd's (say, the ones with Disney as an author). Then delete the individual dvds from the combined editions. This way, I don't have to get the "book deleted message" and begin the search again from the reader's page. I think that will save me precious mouse clicks. Is there any other way to delete more globally?

Thoughts?

That's what I have been doing as well

Race you (smile!)

Dear Lord... they've even added music videos...

I'm giving up and going to bed.

Can one of the super-librarians send them a note? I imagine that it will be a surprise to them when they notice that the DVDs and videos are no longer there. I'd certainly not like for them to re-add the titles.

Yeah, just hit midnight here... I've deleted over 200 of them, maybe more... they have everything from movies to websites to music videos.

Sadly they are listed as one of the top members for adding the most material this week. If this stuff is still here in the AM I'll work on it some more tomorrow.

Would there be any legitimate reason someone would add that many new "books" in a week?

Maybe there should be some sort of hard limit to stop people who are adding invalid items like this, or adding duplicates of books that already exist.

vicki_girl wrote: "I just realized I posted this in the Otis & Jessica folder without meaning to"

Sorry. Actually, I moved it (and emailed Jessica). She is going to contact them.

I meant to also post here, but work interfered. Silly work. ;)

Well, I squashed the rest of the vids and dvds...what a fun task :/

But there are more problems with that person's shelves.

They've got about 300 more "books" with no ISBN.

Go to their ALL bookshelf, switch to print view, then sort by ISBN. There looks to be about 300 or so showing no ISBN. I clicked through a few and they're basically a title and author, nothing else.

Something probably needs to be done with those, too.

I'm too tired to think about it tonight.

Fun. I'll see what I can do in a bit.

We've got another Kathleen Hagen. Many are old books, but some are iffy. Haven't checked them all. Combined and deleted a couple of editions only, so far.

Yeah, quite a few are legit pre-ISBN books.

Deleted one. Realized I am out of my depth. I'm turning this one back to everyone else.

rivka wrote: Actually, I moved it (and emailed Jessica). She is going to contact them.

Oh, okay. So I'm not losing my mind after all (at least not today).

I'm glad you guys are taking this on. I was hesitant to embark on this on my own. The last thing I need to be be fending off digital mobs with electronic torches and pitchforks.

[image error]

Since I found it, I will see if I can take care of some of those empty ISBN's when I have a few minutes.

mlady_rebecca wrote: "Would there be any legitimate reason someone would add that many new "books" in a week?"

Periodically I go through my existing physical bookshelves and log them into Goodreads; this gives me a big surge in numbers every few weeks!

rebecca, AND: When I first joined Goodreads I entered many (real) books that I'd already read. Lots of favorites from childhood and earlier adulthood. I see many new members doing this. Most of us enter real books though. For those members who enter only the books they've read since they've joined Goodreads entering a bunch at once is less likely to happen. I have many books I've read that I haven't entered yet but now I enter them as I see them/think of them so I doubt I'll ever enter many at once again.

I've kind of started looking at those with empty ISBNs (oh, lots of them) and found that:

(a) many have the wrong author (sometimes leading to huge lists that need taking care of eg. Ariel Books)

(b) I'm at a loss with fairly popular books like Oliver Twist or Little Women, which have lots of editions on Goodreads and still this member (viz. Cool Readers) added an edition of their own with no additional hint what actual edition it could be.

For (b) if there is any info (publisher, "Illustrated classics", etc.) I will find an edition that is close to the same thing, and separate it out (and the blank one if needed). Then I combine the blank one and the newly separated one, then delete the blank. Finally I recombine with the original.

If there's nothing but title and author, I combine it if needed, and delete, which merges it with the most popular.

If Jessica is sending them a message, then hopefully from there they will figure out how to select the edition they want.

vicky_girl, that was basically the solution I thought about, still I wanted to confirm my intuition regarding the deletion of the books with no additional hint whatsoever.

Anna wrote: "vicky_girl, that was basically the solution I thought about, still I wanted to confirm my intuition regarding the deletion of the books with no additional hint whatsoever."

Ok, this I can do. I'm back in the mix later tonight.

Went in to see if I could help, but looks like you have it all cleaned up!

About the Disney stuff...
decided to move this monster question to its' own thread

Cait and Lisa, I didn't mean just adding a large number of books. I meant adding a large number of completely new records - books that don't appear in the database in any form, or alternate "books" with different covers.

I've only added maybe 5 books from scratch, and a couple of them ended up already being in the database - slight spelling error.

Unless you had a huge collection of pre-ISBN books, I can't imagine creating such a large number of records completely from scratch.

So, someone adding that many books (from scratch) is most likely to either be adding duplicates of existing books, or other invalid media (like DVDs).

Just wondering if there was something I was missing, or if this would be a valid suggestion for Feedback.

Most of the books I manually add these days are ebooks and that's only like 1 at a time as I read them.

But I agree on the issue about a stopgap. Someone adding 20+ books to the database at once is more likely to be doing something incorrectly than adding valid books.

I agree as well. Bringing it up in the Feedback group sounds like a good notion.

Added suggestion to feedback.

Unless you had a huge collection of pre-ISBN books, I can't imagine creating such a large number of records completely from scratch.

rebecca, Not huge but many, but most members entering brand new items are not in that position, I agree.