Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Hello all

As I update and annotate my personal reading list, I often refer to GOODREADS for information, and if I find something wrong or contradictory, I endeavor - as a GOODREADS LIBRARIAN - to fix, codify, sort, combine and simplify, and have been doing that for a number of years. But I'm a bit flummoxed by this one...

Doing some research on British turn-of-the-century decadent/weird writer R. (Robert) Murray Gilchrist, I glanced at his page and...my God...I'm used to occasionally seeing an oddball book or two show up on an author's page when authors share names, but this page is bizarre. Essentially it looks like someone - possibly one individual - added a bunch of "books" (I put it that way simply because the first one that grabbed my notice was not a book at all but a 6-page article about a modern author, Gilchrist having died in 1917) without thinking to change the author attribution and so "R. Murray Gilchrist" is credited with a huge amount of books mostly published long after he died on subjects he couldn't possibly know anything about. I was going to try to find correct attributions for all these books and fix their entries but this honestly looks like something beyond my scope (plus - what if this idiot is still creating books records in this way?).

So, here it is: R. Murray Gilchrist - what should be done?

Looking at two of those books, I think it may have been an incorrect author merge. But I can't tell because, being merged, the original author name (with ID 699713) cannot be found anymore.

(Both books I looked at appear to have been rescues ('Unknown Book xxxxxxxx'.)

Without even looking closely, I can see 10 books that look like they have nothing to do with a man who lived from 1867-1917.

I'm working on the ones where I can readily find the correct author, either from the cover or Amazon. But a lot of the kindles, for example, will need to be googled instead.

There's a bibliography for the real R. Murray Gilchrist on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_...

I'd say I got most of them, if not all.