I often see classic works, especially, with authors on them that wrote a forward or notes section for the work, rather than the work itself. Same with someone who translated a work. It would be nice to see those marked somehow in the search results. Sometimes an author writes a preface or forward and their name appears before the author of the work, so it would be nice to get some clarity there. It would also be nice to be able to click on those names and see, for example, all of the works that person has translated. Maybe related would be anthologies? Where the "primary" author is usually the editor or the biggest name in the collection. It would be nice to have all of the authors who have a piece in the anthology listed as an author, with the editor distinguished.
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Distinguish authors related to book who didn't write the book
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kestrelladyApr 9, 2021
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Yes, so that's a perfect case of moving those other names to contributors. If you submit a book ticket for cases like this, then one of our librarians can handle it! :-)
Maybe I've just been seeing a lot of the incorrect entries then! I was thinking specifically of a lot of books like this. Obviously, Shakespeare deserves top billing here, and it would be nice if the editors were marked as such.
The anthology case is tricker from a design perspective. Some have 50+! So that's why we default to the editor as the main author and transition the long list into a list of contributors, typically.
We do have the functionality to split out authors and contributors (see attached photo), we just need more help correcting records that have been on the site for a couple of years or ones imported incorrectly!
When we spot those, we do update them, but if you do see some, please hit "Flag incorrect information" as then one of our volunteer Librarians can sort out the record.
Thank you!
Tangent:
I thought you meant, when we manually import a book and the authors name happens to be common, its hard to distinguish them in the drop-down list. Both need more clarity at some point, but I suppose my gripe can be fixed by Librarians after the book has been created.