Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Hi!
This 2 books are the same, but I can't combine them. Maybe because in one the author has a middle initial?

Since She Went Away

Since She Went Away

Also, from what I can see, author writes as David Bell, not David J. Bell. At least Amazon has him as David Bell.

It looks like a big mess as many books appear on both profiles, and also books that look like they were written by another David Bell.

David J. Bell
David Bell

Hi Pia,

There's a lot of arcane librarian knowledge involved in this one...

First off, when authors have common names, like "David Bell", we generally encourage them to adopt a middle initial when claiming their own profile on Goodreads, even if none of their covers also includes that initial. It helps us disambiguate all the similarly named authors in the database. In this case, there's a claimed "David J. Bell" profile, so that's what we use for that particular author.

Moreover, there are actually multiple "David J. Bell" profiles on Goodreads, because even that name is fairly common. To disambiguate authors with otherwise identical names, Goodreads uses extra spaces in the 'author' field. Those spaces are invisible on the user side, but they're visible on the edit pages for books and author profiles. In this case, the David Bell who wrote the book you wanted to combine was "David J.[four spaces]Bell". Without the middle initial AND the extra spaces, the 'David Bell' edition you linked to wasn't appearing on the same author profile as the other edition and thus couldn't be combined.

I added the initial and the extra spaces. Then I combined them. And since it turned out the edition you found was otherwise identical to another record on David J.[four spaces]Bell's profile (both editions had the same cover and publication info, except the ISBN was missing from one of them), I merged them to remove the duplicate record.

I also looked through both the "David[one space]Bell" and the "David J.[one space]Bell" profiles to see if there were any that matched the books on the "David J.[four space]" profile. I found a few and edited the author field to include both the middle initial and extra spaces. There are likely still multiple David Bells on the default, single-space profile, but at least David J.[four space]Bell has been properly disambiguated now.

Sorry to go into such detail, but your request touched on so many different rules at once that I felt the need to explain a lot. :P

Thanks for the fast reply, and the work!
And for explaining! No wonder I couldn't combine the books.

I had all the info on the "spaces" used to disambiguate authors, but I missed the part of the middle initials.
I have to read the librarian manual more carefully.

Have a nice week-end