Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

This is a mess. Just running a search for "Dumas Balsamo" reveals 193 books. Most have the correct author. I would do a major combine operation, but Dumas wrote "Mémoires d'un médecin: Joseph Balsamo" in several volumes, and these get fractured and joined in different ways that are not obvious from the titles. Occasionally, a single book presents all or part of this work together with other works. In the large number of "book" entries, they're combined very inconsistently. The correct combination isn't clear to me.

This problem isn't unique to this one relatively minor work. His other books are also poorly combined or separated. Furthermore, some books appear under a wide variety of incorrect authors. And some books, especially those of his son, are incorrectly classified to this author.

Dufe wrote: "This is a mess. Just running a search for "Dumas Balsamo" reveals 193 books. Most have the correct author. I would do a major combine operation, but Dumas wrote "Mémoires d'un médecin: Joseph Balsa..."

I am working on tidying up Dumas. I started by combining and separating the various editions so that everything that is combined more or less conforms to the same set of chapters of the original work.

During this approximately month-long period when the combining function is down for maintenance, I've turned to the task of fixing the organization of the various series. It seems like the best approach to putting logic into Dumas' various themed trilogies, tetralogies, etc. is to set up a series based on the original French editions (and in most cases, using a French rather than English name for the series). For example, "Trilogie des mousquetaires" is divided into #1 (The Three Musketeers), #2 (Twenty Years After), #3 (Le vicomte de Bragelonne)). (For now, the various Ellsworth translations of oddball intermediate works are still included in this series, but not as primary works.)

I also set up additional series to accommodate the various most common subdivisions of these works into separate volumes. For these, I use the numeration X/Y, with X being the individual volume number and Y being the total number of volumes in that edition of the work.

I've followed more or less the same approach with Dumas's Memoires d'un medecin.