Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

You can now add a librarian note to an author's edit page. It's pretty nice. Nothing on the combine book page yet, unfortunately, but good for those who need to add notes about the style of an author name or info.

Cool.

Do we have a list of things that require librarian notes, or is this more an "as needed" feature?

I recall one of our big examples in asking for the feature was a way to say don't combine certain collections of short stories.

Hmm...nice feature, but I'm not sure about the implementation.

I added a note to an author saying auto-combine shouldn't be used because some books incorrectly combine...and it doesn't show up anywhere useful. The only place to see it is on the edit profile page. Which means anyone going to the combine page isn't going to see it.

Same with book notes. You can add it to the book on the edit page, but a lot of people just work from the combine page. They won't see not to combine something from there and it won't help prevent the errors a lot of us are coming across.

So yeah...good in theory at the moment, but I'm not sure how much it is going to help.

Interesting, book notes did not exist when I posted about author notes a little over half an hour ago. I specifically checked. Obviously we're catching it in the middle of updates.

Must still be working it's way across the system. I just went to double check because I swore I'd seen book notes, but when I opened an edit page, they weren't there. I reloaded the page and they appeared.

So still a work in progress.

Ahah! Notes attached to books are now showing up on the combine page. They are nice and obvious.

See this page for an example.

Very nice. Thanks for the link to the example.

Well, I decided to take immediate advantage of it and mark some of the books which I know have been problematic...a number by Philip K. Dick and Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson...which I first had to separate yet again...but hopefully for the last time thanks to the notes.

Hmmmm....notes apparently cannot be deleted.

Oh, Terrific!

Michael, Thanks for the link.

Well, if they can't be deleted, librarians will have to compose them carefully and will have to make sure to add notes only when they'll be very useful. There will be plenty of instances where that is the case.

I tried to post a librarian note a hour ago and it was possible to delete it then.

Notes rock! I see you've been busy, Michael--beat me to the most important one I wanted to add! lol

What kinds of things do you think should be included in the notes? The most obvious thing would probably be "Stop combining these books", but what else? I don't want to add in stuff that doesn't really matter. What about the English translations for foreign titles? Anything else?

Thanks, Michael! Those notes are beautiful, and hopefully will solve some of our problems.

Very, very cool. :D

Marco, They're to give information to other librarians so that mistakes while doing librarian work will be less likely.

Such as Do not combine ___ because ____
Etc. etc. etc.

Edit: See Michael's example in message 6 in this thread.

I really like that there are both Librarian Notes (visible on the combine page) and Librarian Comments (only visible on the edit page).

Thanks for pointing that out, Rivka! I'd only noticed the add a comment thing.

Hi all, glad you found the feature and that it seems to be working. I hope you don't mind if I opted for sticky-note yellow instead of red and bold.

Michael, you can delete the Librarian Note by just deleting all the text and saving, but I probably should have added a button that just does that. I'll get on it.

Ken-ichi, I really like the sticky-note yellow. It's easily seen!

Agreed. The yellow is an excellent choice. Thanks, Ken-ichi!

The yellow sticky-note is much better than anything I had originally envisioned. I love the implementation.

I tried to delete a note by deleting all of the text and hitting save but I received a message saying something like "the message has to be at least three characters long".

Edit: I tried again, and it deleted now. Given that I discovered the notes in the middle of their implementation, it may be that I just happened to catch it before it was completely finished.

Yes, this is very nice. Thank you for getting this going for us.

Michael wrote: "The yellow sticky-note is much better than anything I had originally envisioned. I love the implementation.

I tried to delete a note by deleting all of the text and hitting save but I received a m..."

These notes are GREAT. Thanks.

I'm playing with this for the first time tonight. Does it take a little while for the notes to show up on the combine page?

Edit: Just tested it, and no.

Keep in mind that Librarian Notes and Librarian Comments are not the same thing.

That's exactly where I went wrong. I've got it now. Thanks for straightening me out, rivka!

Took me a while to figure it out too. ;)

I can't see on the combine page where to add a note, and I really need to. Where do we do it again?!?!?!

That part is on the author's profile edit page, SQRL.

*bangs head against wall*

Thanks, Isis!

But I still can't do it; the add book/author thing won't open. Gah.

Hmm...I tried it as well on a Note for an author. Wouldn't open. Must be a bug.

You could write your message in a comment (like here), use the widget, then copy and paste it into the author note.

Thanks :). At least it's not just my computer, which it often is!

Yup, looks like the "add book/author" link was broken on the librarian note on author form. I committed a fix, should go out real soon. Was that the only bug you guys were experiencing?

Thx, Ken.