The way things stand now, there seems to be only one way to do a clean author
merge. Before merging several author records into one, you need to go through
all the works and point them to the same author record first. The merge will
work properly only when it is done with one author record with many works and
all the other author records with 0 works. When this is done, only one author
record will be returned for every discrete author when a search is requested.
If, however, there are still works spread across different author records when
the merge is done, then all the other author names linger, and the merge is not
clean. For example, if you search on the author name "Hasluck" you will see
that the author Frederick William Hasluck shows up 11 times. However, since
someone has done a merge on this author WITHOUT putting all the works into the
master author record first, there is no way to move those works around now.
There is no way for me to move all the works to the master record for Frederick
William Hasluck, which is OL1435705A, which would eliminate all the other
author names. So if you do a search on Hasluck, you still get 11 results for
Frederick William after the merge, even though there is just one author with
that name. Further, anyone entering a new work by Frederick William Hasluck
will have to sort through those 11 author records and try to figure out which
one is the correct one (which is kind of a joke, since they are all "merged"
and ultimately point to the same author record).
Can anyone think of a way to split out the authors so the merge can be re-done
cleanly? I thought about going through all the works that aren't associated
with the master author record and maybe assigning them somewhere else (i.e. a
dummy author record) and then assigning them back to the master author record
for Frederick William Hasluck. That be a feasible workaround. The problem is,
there is no way of telling *which* works are associated with the master record
and which are associated with the phantom author records, so I would have to do
it for all 14 works...and I am hesitant to put that much work into this author
without knowing if it will work out in the end.
Has anyone worked with this problem and figured it out? I might go ahead and
give it a try with this author and see if it works, and I'll let you all know
how it goes...
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