Author showing no catalogued works

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Author showing no catalogued works

1Carmen.et.Error
Mar 7, 2021, 9:41 pm

So, going to the work-page for Kat Ross shows only the series list and absolutely no books or members who have them. This despite the fact that the individual works like The Daemoniac , Midnight Sea , and others still have their separate pages on the site and show that many members have them catalogued.

Her name seems to be put in correctly on them, yet still leads back to the strange blank page.

Any idea whether this is a bug or some other issue?

2Aquila
Mar 7, 2021, 9:46 pm

I hit recalculate title/author on one of the works, and they seem to have reappeared? http://www.librarything.com/author/rosskat

3AnnieMod
Modificato: Mar 7, 2021, 9:54 pm

They are here now - can you check?

It seems like there is a cache regeneration going through the system - a few weird issues around author and work pages had been reported in the last few hours...

4Carmen.et.Error
Mar 7, 2021, 10:04 pm

>2 Aquila: That seems to have fixed it! Thank you!

5Carmen.et.Error
Mar 7, 2021, 10:12 pm

>3 AnnieMod: Yep! They're back.

6aspirit
Modificato: Mar 7, 2021, 11:14 pm

Seems spotty. The works on Anna Butler's page were gone an hour after the >5 Carmen.et.Error: confirmation. Her page showed series and CK info, but it had neither works nor a member above zero. A few minutes later, the works list returned.

7AnnieMod
Modificato: Mar 7, 2021, 11:35 pm

Cache being rebuilt or one of the servers is being a pain and when you hit that one, things look weird. Or something else equally weird :)

Considering the time and being Sunday, I doubt that anyone from LT will look at that until the morning.

8karenb
Mar 7, 2021, 11:50 pm

This just happened for me on John M. Kemble, so it's definitely systemwide. Weird, though.

9zmeischa
Mar 8, 2021, 1:26 am

Can confirm on Stephen King, Michael Cunningham and Stieg Larsson. And about ten other authors, give or take. "Recalculate" didn't work.

10the_red_shoes
Mar 8, 2021, 1:27 am

>1 Carmen.et.Error: I just had this happen for both G.K. Chesterton and Eden Robinson, and it's very weird. Usually when I click on an author name I get "You have x books by this author," and now I see

Works by Eden Robinson
No works currently cataloged.

Members
Top members (works)
None

Recently added
None

11the_red_shoes
Mar 8, 2021, 1:28 am

>2 Aquila: This didn't work when I just tried it. Did it take a couple of minutes for you?

12timspalding
Mar 8, 2021, 3:54 am

Okay, fixed. Sorry for the issue. I was trying to improve some caching.

13the_red_shoes
Mar 14, 2021, 7:24 pm

This just started happening for me again?

14timspalding
Mar 14, 2021, 7:27 pm

Give me an example? I see books at https://www.librarything.com/author/rosskat

15the_red_shoes
Mar 15, 2021, 3:44 am

>14 timspalding: It is intermittent and as far as I can see has something to do with works combining? Someone splitting authors?

https://www.librarything.com/author/sonyataaffe - clicked on this from my library, no works

https://www.librarything.com/author/taaffesonya - has all her works

16the_red_shoes
Mar 15, 2021, 3:46 am

>14 timspalding: I clicked on Stacey Abrams from my library and got this

https://www.librarything.com/author/montgomeryselena

Is it supposed to look like that? That is her main page, but a writing pseudonym.

17r.orrison
Modificato: Mar 15, 2021, 4:00 am

>16 the_red_shoes:
Yes. Selena Montgomery and Stacey Abrams are the same person, so their pages are combined.

Her real name has been entered as the Canonical name on the page, despite the pseudonym being more popular in usage on LibraryThing, so that's what shows up at the top of the page. (It's like putting "Clemens, Samuel" as the Canonical name on Mark Twain's page.) I'm not going to get into an edit war though, because it was timspalding that did it.

18the_red_shoes
Mar 15, 2021, 4:57 am

>17 r.orrison: I can see doing that for Mark Twain because he didn't publish as Samuel Clemens, but it seems weird to have "selenamontgomery" as the author page for her autobiographical books written as Stacey Abrams. Anyway, the reason I brought it up is I clicked on "Stacey Abrams" in my library and got taken to "selenamontgomery" instead, which is not how I personally would catalogue that book.

19aspirit
Mar 15, 2021, 12:45 pm

We're supposed to combine pen names where possible, but there are times I think we should keep them uncombined. Stacey Abrams' Romance career rarely overlaps with her political career. Throwing all her works together is awkward and confusing.

Just want to say so. I'm also not getting into an edit war over it.

20lorax
Mar 15, 2021, 1:21 pm

aspirit (#19):

They're the same person, though.

I think that having a better UI for differentiating pseudonyms on the author pages would be a better approach. Even if it just said something like ("written as by") in the work list (separate lists would be even better) it would be nice. That's a bit far afield from this bug, though.

21the_red_shoes
Mar 15, 2021, 1:26 pm

>19 aspirit: Stacey Abrams is going to publish a political thriller under her real politics-associated name this May, too, which I guess will go in the LT catalogue under her pen name with this system? ....LOL

22MarthaJeanne
Mar 15, 2021, 1:32 pm

It will be in members' catalogues however they have entered it.

The work will be shown with the author name as chosen by the members. See Secrets and Lies.

It will show up on the author page that has all her works.

23aspirit
Mar 15, 2021, 2:05 pm

She's publishing her thriller as Stacey Abrams. On LT, her thriller, like her political nonfiction, will be listed on the page /selenamontgomery for her Romance byline unless enough copies of her work are entered to Abrams for us to change the combination.

24spiphany
Mar 15, 2021, 3:39 pm

>20 lorax: "I think that having a better UI for differentiating pseudonyms on the author pages would be a better approach."

Agree. Particularly if one is not aware of the pseudonym, having a book appear on a completely different author page than the name on the book is confusing at best, and for authors who use pseudonyms for different types of writing, it makes it more difficult than necessary to identify which titles one is likely to be interested in. Most other book websites manage to make this distinction; it's frustrating that LT is not set up to do so.

25timspalding
Modificato: Mar 15, 2021, 4:01 pm

Stacey Abrams is going to publish a political thriller under her real politics-associated name this May, too, which I guess will go in the LT catalogue under her pen name with this system?

No, the page is clearly labelled as Stacey Abrams.

On LT, her thriller, like her political nonfiction, will be listed on the page /selenamontgomery for her Romance byline unless enough copies of her work are entered to Abrams for us to change the combination.

The URL doesn't matter. We could make it a number, if you'd prefer. It's a number underneath. The page is clearly labelled as Stacey Abrams.

Agree. Particularly if one is not aware of the pseudonym, having a book appear on a completely different author page than the name on the book is confusing at best

There are any number of authors whose pen names merge and mutate, on printed books, in promotional material, and in the book data that LibraryThing uses. A.N. Roquelaure is sometimes A.N. Roquelaure and sometimes Anne Rice—for the same books. Robert Galbraith is sometimes Rowling and sometimes not. Books by "Richard Bachman" are sometimes by him, sometimes by Stephen King, sometimes by "Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman" and sometimes by Stephen King AND Richard Bachman. And god help you if you want to try to separate Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens! (And shall we really have a page for Quintus Curtius Snodgrass?)

Amazon data, library data—they all have different rules about how to understand authors, name variants and pen names.

In sum, there's no firm, underlying reality here other than the author. We can talk about somehow highlighting important pen-names, beyond the part at the top of the page that says:
Includes the names: Stacey Abrams, Selena Montgomery
and then
Disambiguation Notice
Stacey Abrams writes non-fiction under her real name. "Selena Montgomery" is a pseudonym she uses for her fictional works.
But books do not divide authors from their pen names.

26the_red_shoes
Mar 15, 2021, 4:22 pm

>24 spiphany: "Particularly if one is not aware of the pseudonym, having a book appear on a completely different author page than the name on the book is confusing at best, and for authors who use pseudonyms for different types of writing, it makes it more difficult than necessary to identify which titles one is likely to be interested in."

Yes exactly, and that's why I brought it up in the first place!


"Most other book websites manage to make this distinction; it's frustrating that LT is not set up to do so."

Heartily agreed.

27the_red_shoes
Mar 15, 2021, 4:27 pm

>25 timspalding: "A.N. Roquelaure is sometimes A.N. Roquelaure and sometimes Anne Rice—for the same books."

But if I click on "Anne Rice" as the author of Belinda, that takes me to http://www.librarything.com/author/riceanne, not /annerampling. The second is what's happening with Stacey Abrams and /selenamontgomery. Selena Montgomery should redirect to /abramsstacey, not the other way around. /selenamontgomery is clearly the main page on LT.

28timspalding
Modificato: Mar 15, 2021, 4:38 pm

>27 the_red_shoes:

The page is clearly labelled Anne Rice.

You will notice that if I click on Interview with a Vampire I am taken to https://www.librarything.com/work/3437 , even though the name of the book is Interview with a Vampire not 3437. URLs are URLs. They are not the page. The page is really clear, as are the rules for how to name the page.

29the_red_shoes
Mar 15, 2021, 4:43 pm

>28 timspalding: I'm going to drop it since you clearly don't seem inclined to change your mind, but I don't think I am the only one who finds "having a book appear on a completely different author page than the name on the book....confusing at best". It's not "really clear" to some long-term users, if you ever want to consider that datapoint.

30timspalding
Modificato: Mar 15, 2021, 4:56 pm

So, this is what we could do: You know how authors can be divided by their works? We could add another method for users to fragment an author's works by pen names.

But it can't be done automatically, because the data simply isn't consistent enough. Someone would have to decide that these books are by Pen Name A, these by Pen Name B, etc.

I'm worried this is unworkable. People would go bonkers on it, separating out Mark Twain's books although nobody today cares which books were published under what pseudonyms, separating books by trivial variants, etc. Because I really worry. Also it would need to be clear in the software that this is about dividing up authors by their names, not another method of work combination and splitting.

Then, I think, we'd present everything together, but perhaps in subsequent sections, or with the ability to see sub-pages with this or that pen-name.

Also, I think we'd HAVE to keep them as one user in summary data. It would be silly to say you have 2/3 women authors when you have books by Joe Shmoe, Stacey Abrams and Selena Montgomery. (Or, conversely, are we to say Robert Galbraith and George Eliot are male authors because they were presented as such?)

Note, however, that the software is going to stop using those little codes like twainmark and go with numbers soon. Because people get hung up over URLs and the URLs are just internal codes to hang data on.

31Maddz
Mar 15, 2021, 5:35 pm

>30 timspalding: There's also the issue of localisation - UK editions rarely include author middle initials whereas it's more the norm for US editions? How would you handle that?

32MarthaJeanne
Modificato: Mar 15, 2021, 5:51 pm

Take someone like Jean Plaidy. Her best known pseudonyms were Jean Plaidy, Victoria Holt and Philippa Carr. Many of her books were reprinted under various names. Separating the books into the different authors would be difficult.

33melannen
Modificato: Mar 15, 2021, 6:56 pm

>30 timspalding: Note, however, that the software is going to stop using those little codes like twainmark and go with numbers soon. Because people get hung up over URLs and the URLs are just internal codes to hang data on.

Hooray! Thank you, I've wished for this change for awhile.

***

RE Pen names: There is currently a situation where some pen names are combined and some aren't (because in some cases linking pen names, especially for living authors who took pen names for their own protection, can cause real-life problems, even if it is an open secret among their fans.) At the very least we need guidance about when not to combine pen names at all ('If the author/publisher has never publicly acquiesced to link them' is a good start.)

In cases where the pen name is well-known and the author is okay with them being formally linked, I really don't think the situation you're outlining would be that much of a problem? Certainly not more of a problem than the current mishmash we have. People who continue publishing under multiple names even though they are widely known to be the same generally have a specific reason to do so.

A guideline of "Books that have been published under different authorship should be placed with the author on their most recent authorized publication in the original publication language and/or country" would work for 99% of cases, I would say, and usually end up with the result we currently have. Issues like the Richard Bachman one already happen with situations like ghostwritten books that are sometimes published under the original author's name, or books published with different first authors in different places and we figure it out. It still wouldn't fix Good Omens but Good Omens has a chaos demon.

The one thing I can see being an issue is if an author has some books published with, say, initials, and some not, or someone using a married name and an unmarried name at the same time for different works. At what point is something a pen name and not just a variation of the same name? But we have those issues with choosing a main name already too (and even in that case, it probably wouldn't hurt to separate them out as different bylines of the same person; we already sometimes have to put a note on an author page that yes, J. R. French who writes cookbooks and John Robert French who writes thrillers are the same person but used consistently on different books, in order to keep separations under control.)

34lilithcat
Mar 15, 2021, 5:58 pm

>33 melannen:

There is currently a situation where some pen names are combined and some aren't

One of the main reasons for that is because, in some cases, the author has chosen a pen name which is the same as another author's. If author John Jones writes books under the name Sam Smith, and there is another author (or two) named Sam Smith, combining SS with JJ would land the other SS's works on JJ's page, which would be a) wrong, and b) unfair to SS.

35melannen
Mar 15, 2021, 6:53 pm

>34 lilithcat: Wow, yes, definitely also a problem!

36timspalding
Mar 15, 2021, 9:54 pm

>31 Maddz: Right. Or for example that J. K. Rowling is Joanne Rowling in Germany.

Take someone like Jean Plaidy. Her best known pseudonyms were Jean Plaidy, Victoria Holt and Philippa Carr. Many of her books were reprinted under various names. Separating the books into the different authors would be difficult.

Right. These are the issues that worry me.

At the very least we need guidance about when not to combine pen names at all

Give me an example of an uncombined one. The rule is always combine. (Or anyway alias--there might be situations where you can't combine, because it's John Smith and Roger Smith, so you alias John Smith 4 into Roger Smith, or whatever.)

The one thing I can see being an issue is if an author has some books published with, say, initials, and some not, or someone using a married name and an unmarried name at the same time for different works. At what point is something a pen name and not just a variation of the same name?

Yeah, I have no answer. Or see Joanne Rowlking above.

37r.orrison
Mar 16, 2021, 3:29 am

>30 timspalding: Note, however, that the software is going to stop using those little codes like twainmark and go with numbers soon. Because people get hung up over URLs and the URLs are just internal codes to hang data on.

Pre-coffee morning thoughts:

Would it be possible then when entering the author for a book to pick or specify the author directly? So instead of entering "Smith, Bob" and getting /author/smithbob calculated automatically, then having to go to the author page to assign the work to /author/smithbob-2, could the book and work editing UI provide the list of authors named Bob Smith so you can choose one? That same UI could include pseudonyms or real names too - and get rid of the whole author combining and aliasing mess.

Example: say Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain is author 23456 and his g-g-g nephew currently Samuel Clemens (2) is author 98765, could you when entering a work choose 23456 or 98765 directly? (Not by number obviously.) Or would you have to have Samuel Clemens is 1234, the famous one is 1234-1 still aliased into Mark Twain 8888 and the nephew is 1234-2?

38MarthaJeanne
Mar 16, 2021, 4:36 am

>37 r.orrison: How would that work for new members who import lots of books from Amazon and, if they look at the entries at all, complain that 'LT' has given their book a mangled title?

You are assuming that at least most entries are made by experienced users who are willing to work and do research to get a really accurate catalogue.

I'm also not sure that even experienced members will always want to make that call when entering. I've done enough searching for 'unknown's on author pages to know that it isn't always easy to find that information, and that authors with a fairly well defined area of writing can also have written something totally different. (https://www.librarything.com/author/platerormonde)

39bernsad
Mar 16, 2021, 4:47 am

This conversation begs the question of when will we be able to alias 2 split authors together? Surely it can't be that hard when the system already knows their assignments.

40Nicole_VanK
Modificato: Mar 16, 2021, 7:49 am

Should we unravel Lewis Carroll and C.L. Dodgson? I think not. In life he tried to keep those author names separate - many posthumus publications of his works on mathematics and logic are attributed to his pen name though. (And, personally, I find it fascinating that some authors publish books on unrelated subjects).

41timspalding
Mar 16, 2021, 8:49 am

>39 bernsad: You mean one split aliased into another?

42melannen
Modificato: Mar 16, 2021, 10:59 am

>36 timspalding: I'm not going to give you a full example of an uncombined one because the ones I know offhand are people who have specifically requested their pseudonyms not be linked publicly. So far LT users have been very good about respecting cases like that!

(Okay, have half an example: it's a fairly open secret that Astolat self-publishes ebooks under that name, wins major genre awards under one I am 100% not going to ever link it to on LT. That one's relatively low-stakes and mostly to avoid internet drama; there are authors who use pseuds because the stuff they publish under them could get them arrested: see some if the stuff that's gone on with Chinese webnovels in the past few years.)

But I just continue to not see why separating Philippa Carr and Victoria Holt into linked pseuds - with a few simple guidelines as to how - is a worse mess than we've got with her now. If you base it on most recent byline, most authors who have dropped their pseuds will reduce down to one entry anyway. And if they have one book that *hasn't* ever been pubbed without the pseud, that's useful info to preserve. If a book has never been published without the pseud, no library is going to catalog it that way.

If you base it on original byline of work instead, you get a different result but an even simpler outcome, and works will be even easier to sort and less likely to change. And sure, either way it won't always match what's on somebody's cover, but the current system often doesn't match what's on *anyone's* cover.

43lorax
Mar 16, 2021, 9:38 am

timspalding (#30):

You know how authors can be divided by their works? We could add another method for users to fragment an author's works by pen names.

That's what I was getting at back in #20 when I talked about a clearer UI. Frequently authors use pseudonyms to differentiate between genres - even if they're not making any effort to hide the linkage (Iain (M.) Banks is an obvious example) it's useful for readers to know whether that new book is one they're interested in or not. Consider the case of Ursula Vernon / T. Kingfisher, who currently uses the former for kids' books and the latter for books for adults (she has some early stuff for adults that's under Ursula Vernon). It could be useful to see at a glance from her page which are which.

Note, however, that the software is going to stop using those little codes like twainmark and go with numbers soon. Because people get hung up over URLs and the URLs are just internal codes to hang data on.

Is that going to be backwards-compatible with existing links, particularly author touchstones?

44melannen
Modificato: Mar 16, 2021, 10:16 am

>43 lorax: I was just going to edit in Ursula Vernon. She keeps the pseuds separate in official publishing-related spaces and library catalogs because she doesn't want completist 8-year-old fans* of Ursula Vernon's Hamster Princess to think they need to read her Machen-inspired body horror and adult fantasy romance (also feat. body horror). She doesn't completely separate them on social media or at cons, etc. because she figures any Hamster Princess fans who are already online unsupervised have seen worse.

That seems like a pretty good use case for keeping separate-but-linked work lists on LT. Think of the Hamster Princess fans! If fifty years from now her publisher decides it's not worth it any more and publishes a Complete Works under Ursula Vernon, we can change it here, too.

(It may also be part of why she's not a LibraryThing author, if her publisher/agent don't want her being Official Publishing Her anywhere they're not separated.)

(She also has a third, secret pseud that is probably on LT somewhere but I don't know it, I only know it exists because she's used her UrsulaV social media to request that people who do know not link them.)

* I had no idea how many militantly completist 8-year-olds there were until I started working at a public library

45IsabelHolland
Mar 16, 2021, 10:21 am

Questo utente è stato eliminato perché considerato spam.

46spiphany
Mar 16, 2021, 12:27 pm

What I was thinking of was some way to mark titles as having originally been published under a particular pseudonym (and, ideally, being able to view the subset of titles published under that name, either grouped on the main author page or on a sub-page).

I have a preference for original byline rather than most common byline here. I realize it's not uncommon for titles to be republished under a different name (generally some form of the author's real name), but it seems me important that the original byline of a title doesn't get lost just because fewer catalogued copies use it.

Particularly for pseudonyms where the author's real identity isn't initially known, the pseudonymous identity has a history and a social meaning which doesn't disappear just because certain additional information has been revealed. I'm thinking of, for example, Macpherson's Ossian poems, which have a literary reception history specifically connected with the purported authorship by "Ossian", or Louisa May Alcott's pseudonymously published thrillers, which are likely of interest to fans precisely because of the way this is thematized in the figure of Jo in Little Women. Or the author of the 1804 novel "Nachtwachen", who wasn't definitively identified as being August Klingemann until the 1980s!

(Or to use an analogous example from a semantics class: the planet Venus is known as both the morning star and the evening star. But while the referent is the same, the meaning and significance are very different.)

47melannen
Modificato: Mar 16, 2021, 12:45 pm

>46 spiphany: I think there are cases where original byline doesn't work - i.e., Isaac Asimov's Paul French stories, where he gave up on the pseudonym before he even finished writing the original series. That's kind of why I was thinking most recent "authorized" publication - anything in the public domain can technically be published as whatever, so you'd need something to specify. It makes the distinction between cases like Paul French, where Asimov clearly wanted to drop the pseud, and a random discount Twain reprint that uses Clemens, or something like Nachtwachen.

There would still be a few complications in cases where it's unclear who if anyone has the current right to authorize, and of course authors that predate the modern publishing system, but for a lot of those we aren't going to be able to use any modern naming standards anyway.

48spiphany
Mar 17, 2021, 1:27 am

>47 melannen: Not sure I agree. There are cases where an author initially adopts a pseudonym for any of a number of pragmatic, political, and/or artistic reasons, but is quite happy to claim their book under their usual writing name once the secret is out. Just because they authorize the reissuing of their title under a different name doesn't mean that the original byline is irrelevant.

I'm thinking of someone like Stephen King, whose books as Richard Bachman have, as I understand it, been rereleased under his own name (or in some cases credited to "Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman"), or Joanne Greenberg, whose "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden" was originally published under the name "Hannah Green", but now is listed under her own name.

Or cases like some Soviet writers who used a pseudonym for certain works smuggled abroad because it wasn't safe to publish under their real name but later reclaimed their authorship when the political situation had changed. (Andrei Sinyavsky isn't a perfect example, because his "Abram Tertz" pseudonym became something of a literary persona for him and continued to be used even on later publications of the texts -- albeit often with the addition of his real name alongside it.)

This is information I want to see listed somewhere more prominent than an inconspicuous line in the work's CK. To be clear, I'm leaning towards something where the original byline is noted somewhere prominent regardless of which authorial identity "wins out" based on number of copies.

49Maddz
Mar 17, 2021, 3:03 am

Hmm. Maybe we want something like work-to-work relationships functionality? So you can link 2 authors who are the same person but different names with the relationship of pen name.

You've got the link, but the two pages remain separate entities. On the main author page (Joe Blogs), you've got all the works, perhaps grouped by name used (which may be difficult if later published under the main name). On the pen name page (Tom Smith), you've just those works published under that pen name, with a line at the top of the page - pen name of Joe Blogs which is hyper-linked to the Joe Blogs page.

50MarthaJeanne
Modificato: Mar 17, 2021, 3:21 am

I certainly want to see them all together on the same author page even if there is also a way to see them separate. For years I liked the works of Plaidy, Carr and Holt before I knew they were the same person, but now I throw them together in my mind and don't bother sorting them out.

BTW If you click on 'examine and separate out names.' you get a rough separation based on how members entered the books.

51spiphany
Modificato: Mar 17, 2021, 3:59 am

>50 MarthaJeanne: Yeah, something similar to the list on the "examine and separate out names" page would be nice, just somewhat more sophisticated -- at present it doesn't distinguish between a) variants of a name and b) distinct pseudonyms, which is not a trivial issue in the case of authors whose name may be written in any of a number of ways (different romanizations of Cyrillic, for example).

Also "combine and separate names" is very much not an obvious place to look if one just wants to see how an author's books break down into different pseudonyms.

52melannen
Mar 17, 2021, 10:45 am

>48 spiphany: I think I pretty much agree with you that this is important information to keep - especially in cases like Bachman and Tertz that became their own personae to the extent that the authors kept putting them on certain books along with their better-known name after they stopped trying to separate.

I think my main principle is respecting what an author/estate has chosen to do. In most cases where a pseud stops being used (or gets relegated to small print) on reprints, it's because the author doesn't want it used on that book anymore, and that's fair. It's also the author name that someone trying to find the book on a bookstore or library shelf would need to know to use.

But original pen name data should definitely be easily visible on the author page even if the pen name isn't the current main byline of the book.