Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Hello! I recently did a disambiguation of authors named Tom Brown.

I followed the procedure of disambiguation as specified in the manual, but, seeing as there are a dozen or so authors who have published under that name, there were quite a few spaces in the names by the end of it. Now that they've been separated, should I amend the names with middle names or initials that are omitted from their pen names, as it were? I know that policy states that whatever is written on the cover should be what's in the author field, but I wondered if there were an exception for such cases where there are this many authors vying for the same name.

Another thing I would like to ask about is the policy regarding author data. I assume we can use the About the Author blurbs from publisher sites, but a lot of the authors in this set are primarily something else, and thus do not always have such blurbs or are published by irregular publishers. For example, since professors are usually published by their universities, are their profiles acceptable sources for biographies? What about other employment profiles, such as for journalists?

Sorry for making such a long-winded post and thanks for reading!

If an author has only published books with "Tom Brown", then no middle name/initial should be added. If there are some editions (or heck, even one) that have an initial, then go ahead and add it. But otherwise, author profiles have to match the covers of the books they're associated with.

Not sure about author blurbs. I figure if it's in Wikipedia or something obviuosly open source, then it's ok. Or Amazon or publisher's pages or author's own web pages. But I've never felt comfortable grabbing data beyond that, even if it's more or less public like LinkedIn or something. If there's no blurb available but it's clear from their books/Google searches that they are, e.g., an astronomer or self-help author or whatever their occupation is, I will occasionally add a note to that effect to help future disambiguation efforts.

I've often wished that we had a policy to NOT disambiguate authors with such common names unless asked to by someone who is going to claim a profile. I know you put in a ton of effort to disambiguate Tom Brown, but unless you or some group of librarians commits to constant vigilance, the next time a big database imports more Tom Brown books, all your hard work will be undone. Seems easier to just let the one-space profile be default, and then disambiguate as needed for people claiming profile and/or really important public figures that have a big (librarian) audience that can be relied on to police the profile(s) in the future.

Just a thought I wanted to put out there for discussion.

Z-squared wrote: "If an author has only published books with "Tom Brown", then no middle name/initial should be added. If there are some editions (or heck, even one) that have an initial, then go ahead and add it. But otherwise, author profiles have to match the covers of the books they're associated with."

One exception: if the author prefers to use a middle initial (or middle name, even) for disambiguation purposes, that is fine even if none of their book covers have that middle initial. However, please note that if; it should be solely by author request (unless it appears on some of their covers).


Z-squared wrote: "the next time a big database imports more Tom Brown books, all your hard work will be undone."

Not really. The imports won't move the books back, so it doesn't "undo" anything. It does introduce a new batch of books needing to be moved, but if the new profiles have either bios or Librarian Notes, that should be significantly less painful than starting from scratch.

Thanks for the clarification.

I guess it just bugs me that disambiguated profiles aren't always the easiest to see from a top level, so even when a librarian has done all the disambiguating previously, I can't easily tell which author profile is which without some trial and error. Not to mention there's no way to easily disambiguate books off one profile to several other simultaneously (I would kill for some sort of drag-and-drop system for this).

...unless someone knows a good way to view all profiles at once that differ only in spaces that I haven't figured out?

You mean something other than the similar names page, right? That's not quite what you're asking for (among other things, you can't see bio or Notes there), and for authors with many many similar names it gets rather crowded. But I find it pretty useful.

rivka wrote: "You mean something other than the similar names page, right? That's not quite what you're asking for (among other things, you can't see bio or Notes there), and for authors with many many similar n..."

Yes, I've recently started using the similar names page function more often, but it's not the sort of thing that helps with disambiguation. It would be nice if there was a page that collected all author profiles that differed ONLY in number of spaces. Even if that same page didn't show much in the way of additional info, just being able to see all the extant ones at once (I'm having visions of then opening them all in separate tabs to help with the disambiguating process) would be a big help.

Well, I haven't really done much librarian stuff and am new to the policies, so this might just be me being ignorant, but if the alternative is that the single-space profiles of common author names are constantly inundated with titles that are difficult to properly sort, then wouldn't it be easiest to just make those profiles disambiguation profiles, holding links and information about all the author profiles whose books end up in it?

That is more or less what I did with Robert Adams, because it's hard to say which of the two major authors with that name were most prolific (oops, I wrote both are deceased, but only one is, the other is just retired.) If one was still actively writing or had vastly more books than all the others I would have been tempted to leave them with the default profile though. And I make an effort to go through that one and clean up once a month or so.

It depends, in other words.

(ETA: Since searching for Robert Adams is hopeless, I meant this page, which still probably collects another three or four different Robert Adams: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show... )

Krazykiwi wrote: "That is more or less what I did with Robert Adams, because it's hard to say which of the two major authors with that name were most prolific (oops, I wrote both are deceased, but only one is, the o..."

Awesome, I think I'll follow your lead on that.

In the case of the single-space Tom Brown, I went the other way; whoever that Tom Brown is that collaborated somehow on the Pictorial History of Grundy County, I couldn't find a scrap of information about him. The publisher was a Bank branch, that only ever published that one book and has since been moved and renamed, he never collaborated with any of his co-contributors again, as far as I could tell, and later publishers of the book did not carry any author information. Any other book that enters that profile is certainly misplaced, but I feel that makes it easier to see what needs to go.

Also, I found a little trick for easily navigating to specific same-named profiles - if you use the add book/author feature for comments to search for a profile while writing it with a number of spaces, the only result you'll get is the particular profile with that exact number of spaces or else nothing, except in the case of the 1-space where it will do a search. However, even then, the name that matches the one you searched for will be the 1-space entry.

Alex wrote: "Also, I found a little trick for easily navigating to specific same-named profiles - if you use the add book/author feature for comments to search for a profile while writing it with a number of spaces, the only result you'll get is the particular profile with that exact number of spaces or else nothing, except in the case of the 1-space where it will do a search. However, even then, the name that matches the one you searched for will be the 1-space entry. "

Neat trick! Thanks for the tip!