Accuracy of editions in Legacy Libraries?

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Accuracy of editions in Legacy Libraries?

1johnandlisa
jan 29, 2021, 2:37 pm

This is probably a topic that has been dealt with somewhere in the group, but I just noticed it and I'm not sure what you folks have been doing about it.
I just entered a book by Louis Menand into my library and looked at his author page. https://www.librarything.com/author/menandlouis I noticed several Legacy Libraries listed as having books by Louis Menand, some of which were from people who died before Menand was born. Presumably that is because Menand wrote an introduction or the like for a reprint of an earlier book that was in the Legacy Library collection. Is there some strategy for avoiding these false positives for authors involved in later editions of some work?

2JBD1
Bewerkt: jan 29, 2021, 3:01 pm

Yeah, "other author" issues get tricky (this one is down to Menand having written a foreword to some editions of To The Finland Station, looks like). The "Legacy Libraries" section on author pages draws from work-level data, so these false positives do happen sometimes. It's a known issue but not one that's been sorted out yet on a site-wide basis (if we only were to include Legacy Libraries info where it applied to "all editions" of a book, we'd probably get just as many false negatives in the other direction). So, tricky and not easily solved, alas ...

(ETA, though - LLs mostly try to be accurate with the edition included, or to remove edition-level info if it's unclear which edition was actually in the person's library!)