Made a Mess of ISBN 0486227804 and 0486227812

For reasons unclear to me, various screens relevant to separating and combining show the book title, and not the book's ISBN.

I presume that every single "book" with ISBN 0486227804 is the same book (never mind work), and it's volume 1 of Budge's Osiris. Likewise, every single "book" with ISBN 0486227812 is volume 2 of the same book.

I retitled whichever one of them is "my book" appropriately, so now https://www.librarything.com/work/435751 shows to me as Osiris and the Egyptian resurrection, vol 1 with the appropriate cover. Ditto for https://www.librarything.com/work/30472141, which shows as volume 2.

The problem is that the *former* work appears to also include the set of two books. As with Gods of the Egyptians, both the individual volumes I added were treated as being instances of the set.

I was successful in separating out the specific 'book' that was my volume 2, and merging everything with volume 2 in the title. I was unsuccessful at separating out the specific 'book' that was my volume 1. So now I'm going through and separating all 'books' with the same ISBN as my 'book'. Merging to the correct book after doing this won't be possible. (It could be done if one were very careful to select the newly split book each time and add it to an otherwise empty workbench, but I wasn't experienced enough to think of that in time.)

This would be easier if I could open the "separate" UI in its own tab for each book, but that's not possible. It would be easier if I could add the newly separated book to my workbench from the post-separation screen, and then go back to the original work's editions page, which still has 7 more 'books' with the only ISBN I'm *sure* has been miscombined in all cases. It would be easier if I could select all the books I want to separate at once. It would even be easier if I had a way to somehow select "uncombine MY book", and could leave the rest of the mess for people who either don't care (OK) or would prefer their library to be accurate, but don't have the skill to fix this (bad).

As it is, I'm done. Next time this happens, I'm deleting the book and then re-adding it using manual entry, with the volume included in the title. I'll then merge it to the correct work manually, and leave the pre-existing mess for someone who finds this user interface a lot more usable than I do.

I hope some such person will be motivated to clean up the multitude of books and works for the two volumes of Budge's Osiris & the Egyptian Resurrection. But it's not going to be me.

Note for the record - some of the books claiming the ISBN of the first volume, are nonetheless showing a title for the whole set. I really wish I could find *my* book on the "editions" page and not make this mess.

Also, after separating every single example of ISBN 0486227804 shown on the editions page for https://www.librarything.com/work/435751 my book was still associated with this work. I had entered my book by ISBN; apparently it lost that information somewhere along the way.

I'm now going to delete the book and re-add it using "add manually". Hopefully if I put "volume 1" early enough in the title, my book won't be auto-merged with a wrong book and a wrong work.

IMNSHO, it would be a great idea for the interfaces used by combiners to be completely reworked to provide a lot more information and a few extra options (see above). And the title match heuristic should be tweaked such that perennial problem books should be able to flagged as requiring more than the standard number of characters (20?) to declare a title match.

I'll have a go at sorting things out regarding vol 1 and vol 2, as I can see on the /editions page that there are some mixups at present. Will edit this post when done.

You might have set off down a wrong path with faith in the ISBN, as the title is more likely to be correct (eg. user searches for title, doesn't realise they've added vol 2, simply "corrects" the title into vol 1, never even notices the ISBN). Or in some cases the ISBN genuinely could be on different volumes of a set, whether by intent or misprint.

Edit: done, only did three or four adjustments, also have added work-relationships of contains for the volumes to the complete work.

>2 Nevov: Thank you very much. I didn't think about the case where the user adds by searching for the title, fails to find an exact match, and edits the match they got. I should have thought of it though, since I did that a lot myself in my early years on LibraryThing. (Now I use manual entry for any book that has neither an ISBN nor a Library of Congress number.)

>1 ArlieS:
You've covered a lot of other ground :-D but there might be some I can answer/assist on:

It is possible to separate multiple editions together, via workbench, by hitting multiple (separate) before hitting the orange Separate These Editions, unless I'm missing your meaning.

There are some tricks depending on browser and setup, such as ctrl- or shift- click to send newly separated things to a new tab (or via right-click menu). But agree in general more tools could exist; it is inefficient not being able to do such as "separate and add to workbench" in one move.

If it's of use for keeping track, the homepage Your Feed records your combination and separation actions: https://www.librarything.com/yourfeed.php

>1 ArlieS:
>(I'll) leave the pre-existing mess for someone who finds this user interface a lot more usable than I do.

There's really not much traffic in the "please fix this book" pinned thread in this group, so if you hit one that's horrible, can post it into there rather than suffer through it. Some of these that you're hitting are at the deep end of things and you're getting caught up in some pre-existing messes.

>1 ArlieS: Budge is always a mess.

Having said that, unfortunately we can't just assume that all books with the same ISBN are the same. Cataloguing mistakes happen, but publishers make mistakes too (and some of them have even re-used ISBN codes deliberately).

>5 Nicole_VanK: Sadly I've seen that too - even the fun case where the physical book has two different ISBNs, one on the reverse side of the title page, and the other on the back cover. (A librarian friend tells me that in that case, the one inside the book should be used.)

On a different note, at the moment I feel like the Sorceror's Apprentice. I thought I knew what I was doing in combiner space, and now I feel like all I'm capable of is making work for others. My apologies to all for the assumption that I could trust ISBNs in this particular case. (When I've encountered a publisher error, the book I tried to add by ISBN wound up part of a work with the wrong title and perhaps wrong author, which made it rather obvious.So I was reasonably sure these books didn't have this problem.)

>6 ArlieS: Everyone learns the isbn lesson by actually messing it up - it does not stick otherwise. The fact that you came to ask for help when you realized you are lost instead of just leaving the mess and walking away or adding more of the same type makes you a good person in my book.

Or in short - everyone messes up, you learn from it and move on and we can fix anything - it may take awhile sometimes and it may be gnarly but it is fixable. :)

One quick note - deleting and adding again never makes things better. It may help your copy if you go manual and manage not to trigger auto-combining but deleting a book does not really delete it - it deletes your connection to it only. And zero copies books are much harder to deal with. Plus once combined, the next person adding the same way will land where you landed (which is why we clear zero copies and combine them where they belong - so they attract their replicas later - which is also why we are so careful of where unclear books go for the most part). Multi-volume works are the bane of the site - due to how things combine and how a lot of sources record them, these are very prone to issues. :)

>7 AnnieMod:
Well said! :-)

>7 AnnieMod: >8 Felagund: Thank you both.