I am finding that the search results for an author isn't changed even after an
author merge. I have several examples of this from recent work. One is Janet
Louise Moody. There were two records for her, so a search on her name returned
two results, OL5410443A and OL5410444A. After moving both works to one author
record, I merged the author records. However, if you do an author search for
her you still get both author records above in your result. If you try to merge
them again, you will find that there is only one author record now, OL5410444A.
OL5410443A has been merged into OL5410444A, but it still shows up in the author
search.
Even worse, if you have an author whose name is misspelled and you merge that
author record with author records in which the name is spelled correctly, you
are preventing the works listed under the misspelled author's name from EVER
showing up in an author search result, because searching with the correct
spelling will NEVER return all the results. So, for example, if you merge a
"Willam Shakespeare" author record with a "William Shakespeare" one, the works
under the misspelling will never appear in a search for "william shakespeare".
Which is freaky, because if you open the page for one of those works, the
author will show as "William Shakespeare." I think this problem has the
potential to introduce a great deal of confusion into the database.
The workaround for this problem is to move all the works from the misspelled
author record to the correct author record (by editing each one and changing
the author name) before merging the author records. Unfortunately, this is
nearly impossible to do if you are working with an author with more than a few
author records, however, since it is hard to know if you are choosing the
correct author name -- you can't chose the author record by number, you have to
type in his or her name and hope you are picking the record you chose to be the
master record. I had a workaround for this problem that involved putting
different numbers of spaces between the first name and last name on each record
so I could keep them straight. Honestly, it is more than a bit tricky.
I'm pretty sure I brought this problem up about a year ago, but I don't recall
what the outcome was then. Since I have encountered it again recently, I
thought I'd ask about it again.
Also, hey, when will we be able to merge editions into works?
Sarah
_______________________________________________
Ol-discuss mailing list - Ol-discuss@archive.org
http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss
Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-discuss@archive.org/
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to
ol-discuss-unsubscr...@archive.org
