I decided to start doing librarian tasks more regularly on LibraryThing, and I now have a shiny new time-waster. I've done about 300 work combinations in the past week, just by going through authors in my collection, authors I know here on Booklikes, and authors I've read or heard about. I even managed to do an author combination when I realized that one of the books in my collection was orphaned due to the author's name having been misspelled by the publisher (oops).

Things I'm still wary of touching: non-English works (I've been fixing a few manga combination errors, but very gingerly) and authors who are also in some way involved in comics/graphic novels (often confusing and/or overwhelming). But I think it's going well, and I have a new fondness for authors who title their novels, stories, and omnibus volumes in such a way that it's crystal clear which is which. As far as everybody else goes, thank goodness for disambiguation notes.

I felt like doing some BookLikes database maintenance tonight and thought I'd post some comments about that. One thing that pleases me: when I change the edition I have on my shelves, the edition you see on my review also changes. I love that! I changed some by hand ages ago, but it was difficult and took more steps than I would have liked.

Another thing that pleases me: even though I'm not a BookLikes Librarian, so far any changes I've made have been approved within a few hours of me making them. Not bad.

I do wish that there was a bit more guidance for certain things. Maybe Librarians get more info? For example, series titles - should they be listed in the Title field as well as the Series field? If they aren't, does that affect searching? With a lot of manga, I've seen series title and numbering included in the Title field, but not any of the series fields.

One thing I've noticed: I've been pretty bad about adding the edition I actually read to my shelves. Part of me thinks "Eh, I don't really care." And part of me wants to start being better about having more accurate data, so I can potentially look at nifty stats later on. I'm sure my LibraryThing collections are a mess, and I know my BookLikes shelves are. For someone who catalogs books for a living, I've been pretty sloppy with my personal records. I'm going to try to be better. Let's see how long that lasts. :-)