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Be respectful of the volunteer's time, of course, and do your research first.. but those wonderful people are there to make the database of books more accurate and complete. Some things they can do are:

Add a cover image, if you can upload one or point to one.

Correct misspellings, say of author's names.

Combine or separate authors - for example there are two name Sydney Taylor but all works were listed under just one so I had to ask they be separated.

Correct year published.

Add a description, or replace a publisher's rave with a better description.

So, when you have a book that you think should have a more accurate listing, ask for Librarian help!

Would any librarians like to comment? I'm sure there are things we could do to make your efforts more effective....

One of the things I see most often over there is to add or correct the number of pages, especially of electronic books.

I'm a librarian but I normally will only do descriptions and book covers. I don't feel comfortable doing anything else.

I'm a GR librarian and would be glad to help out. Links or providing the correct information is helpful, especially for older, OOP books. We can also help make sure books are in the right series, author pseudonyms are combined, note when a book was originally published, list any awards the book received, provide feeds to blogs (even for non-GR authors) and so on. It never hurts to ask if something can be fixed.

Electronic books are supposed to have the page number set at 0. This is due to the unknown of the font size a reader can set on their readers, making there no way to pinpoint what the number of pages should be. Although I have seen where it is set as the number for the most popular edition as well.

Combining different editions of identical books is another common task, and is helpful to have done when members use the compare books feature to compare books with other members.

Lisa wrote: "Combining different editions of identical books is another common task, and is helpful to have done when members use the compare books feature to compare books with other members."

Lisa, does this mean if you have the same book shelved but a different edition of it, it won't show up when doing member comparison of books? I did a big (for me) combine last week including fixing the author's name, since some had ended up under an incorrect form of his name.

Dawn, If the editions are combined, any edition of the book will show up if both members have it shelved. If the editions are not combined, compare books won't show it. That's one reason we combine editions. Yes, once you did that name change and combine, giving time for caching issues, members comparing that book will see it, no matter what edition they've each shelved.

ditto everything Dawn says -I'm happy to help with disambiguating authors, adding series information, and I love working on autor bios for authors who don't have one, especially OOP and authors from past generations.

Pamela(AllHoney) wrote: "I'm a librarian but I normally will only do descriptions and book covers. I don't feel comfortable doing anything else."

Im with Pamela..Im only comfortable with these two at the moment..I wont mess with something Im not sure of yet.

I've been a librarian for a while now, still not doing much of the tricky stuff. But it's great to be able to clean up descriptions, and do other obvious fixes without posting in the librarian's group. Otoh, I know some librarians actually like to see the number that indicates how many edits they've done, and so they like to do fixes & get the satisfaction of knowing they've made GR a better place.