Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

This is a bit of an esoteric one, but I hope that there's either already an established answer, or this will lead to one.

T.E. Lawrence, late in his life, produced a translation of Homer's Odyssey. There are a few editions of it among the 800 editions of the Odyssey listed, and those are all fine. However, at the time it was published, he had legally changed his name to T.E. SHAW, and early editions of his translation were published with this name.

When adding an edition published under Shaw, what's the best way to handle this? Users looking for works by Lawrence would no doubt want to see the translations that were published as Shaw. Is there a good way to have the book linked to the Author page for T.E. Lawrence, while still noting that the work was published under Shaw?

The LOC Authority record for T.E. Shaw points to T.E. Lawrence, if that matters any.

On a related matter, there's only one work listed under T.E. Shaw (THE ODEYSSEY OF HOMER). I can't vouch for the details of this particular edition (i.e. the title spelling), but at the very least it should probably be merged with The Odyssey. I'm a new librarian and not sure how to do that, so I thought I'd leave it for more capable hands.

I merged T.E. Shaw into T.E. Lawrence. Since all references to T.E. Shaw on WorldCat and the LOC point to T.E. Lawrence, I figured that was a safe bet. Most authors who write under pseudonymous have separate entries for each name in those databases, T.E. Lawrence didn't. Although when someone writes as a distinct pseudonym, we do keep those names separate.

Once I merged them I added Homer as an author and rearranged them so that Homer was the first author. In order to combine editions of a book the author in the first position needs to be the same for each edition, then you can combine as normal. :)

Thanks, Vicky!

I can use some help with this author: Anna James & Anna James. Can't figure out if it's the same author or not.
I'm not sure if the error is on amazon, or with one of the profiles. The author has control of her profile, so it must be the other profile, which has some of her books listed that might be the problem.

I noticed that there is two spaces on the author's profile though, between the first name and last name, instead of the regular one. Was this done intentionally to distinguish both profiles, because they had the same name, or was it an error?

Rossy wrote: "I noticed that there is two spaces on the author's profile though, between the first name and last name, instead of the regular one."

That's how we disambiguate authors with the same name. It's likely that some of the books need to be moved to the two-space (GR) author from the author profile.

Yes, i wondered if that was the case, but because the other profile had other pseudo names, i was not sure if it was not the same person.

Now that i know for sure though, i'll go ahead and change the author's actually books with the disambiguated name. Thanks Rivka!

:)

Rossy wrote: "I can use some help with this author: Anna James & Anna James. Can't figure out if it's the same author or not.
I'm not sure if the error is on amazon, or with one of the profiles. The author has ..."

Was this ever fixed? I still see both authors listed...

And as was explained, that is deliberate.

I guess I just don't understand, shouldn't all the books be moved and merged to one profile?

No - they are different authors with the same name

I gotcha, it looks like there is just one book that is listed on both profiles, so that one needs to be changed and merged, then possibly deleted if they are dups...