> I am not too sure about saying ISBNs for 'rejected' item types
> should/could (not) be added to 'accepted' item types. If possible, it
> would be nice if an ISBN only points a user to the item it was
> attached to, not a related item. It is not possible (AFAIK) to explain
> which ISBN is for what. On the other hand, it's sometimes hard to see
> what an ISBN on an item identifies*, so you can't always tell whether
> a mistake was made or that a related ISBN was added.
Since the motto of OL is one web page for every book, I separate out records
that contain multiple formats. So if I am working on a record and it has more
than one ISBN, I make a new record and move the paperback version over there.
Sometimes they have different covers, so to me they are different books.
The bigger question here is where did all this bad information come from? It
strikes me as sub-optimal to import a huge amount of data automatically and
then have humans painstakingly sort through it and discard the non-book items
one by one. And that's the best-case scenario: at this point, the human workers
don't even have this ability. As a user, I sometimes get frustrated with the
amount of disorderly information in OL, especially since as a user I don't have
the tools to clean it up. I think I would spend more time on the database if a)
I could make meaningful changes (like removing non-book items or merging
duplicate records), and b) I didn't feel like somewhere around half of the
records are duplicates (why bother fixing a record when it has twins out there
that are just as incomplete?).
Sarah
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