Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

If this question has been addressed previously or belongs in a different area, I apologize beforehand for missing it in my searches.

Regarding author information: for country of birth a drop-down list is available that seems to include current countries only, and I see no way to enter manually the name of a former country.

The example I'm looking at is George Gamow, born in Odessa. Today it's in Ukraine, of course, but at the time it was in the Russian Empire (not today's Russian Federation). It would be great in situations like this to have a way to sidestep the drop-down list and enter the correct country manually (as is available for genre). Any positive guidance or feedback would be welcome.

Goodreads gets their country list from an outside source.

The country isn't mandatory though and you can get around it by adding the county in the city box. I often do this with the United Kingdoms since it only appears as one entity in the country list and specific states in the US. For example:

City: London, England
Country: United Kingdom

will show on the author profile as:

London, England, United Kingdom

So you could easily put "Odessa, Russian Empire" in the city field. I don't think we have an official way to deal with this, but that makes the most sense to me!

Vicky wrote: "Goodreads gets their country list from an outside source..."

Thank you for the info and feedback. That sounds like the perfect solution and does make good sense. I followed your suggestion, and it looks as good as anything. Thanks again.