Howdy!
As you are most likely aware, the Shelfari Catalog needs a lot of clean up! There are some Shelfari Special Projects that have been been set up for that purpose and you can read about those on the Shelfari Librarians and Editors Group at http://www.shelfari.com/groups/10713/about
In conversation with Shelfari Staffers Amanda and Tim, we thought a controlled structured approach of asking groups to help might also work to clean up the catalog.There are some risks with this - overloading the approval process, having people who are not sufficiently aware of the purpose of the various sections edit them with less-than-helpful text, and generally causing confusion in the system. The benefits, though, if the group admins are careful about how they involve the group members, are that knowledgeable and skilled people can do a much faster audit of what is on the catalog and contribute very meaningful edits to improve the catalog.
As a sort of trial run for this concept and because it can cause a lot of posting, I've elected to use a private group approach to ask members of the Science Fiction Group to participate in this work.
There are several steps involved. What we really want are well-written and complete Detail Pages for combined books. To get to that point, we usually take these steps:
1) Combine ALL duplicate copies in the catalog -- including all foreign language translations you can find.
2) Clean up the Detail Page for the resulting combined version which ensures that the Title is clean and that appropriate authors/contributors are shown and linked in the system
3) Fill in all the relevant sections of the Detail Pages - especially the Description
4) Clean up the "editions" tab
5) Set up any Series Records that are appropriate
If a group does this for all the books on that group's bookshelf, that will move us toward a cleaner Shelfari Catalog.
As of 2/4/10, there were 1228 books on the Science Fiction Group Bookshelf. Those books are our baseline, and you can find the list here: http://www.shelfari.com/groups/51004/discussions/185850/List-of-Books-to-Work
If you are interested and willing to do this work:
1) Sign into this group and say so.
2) Read the How-To Thread, here: http://www.shelfari.com/groups/51004/discussions/251873/-b-READ-THIS-SECOND-b-How-To- -- it has detailed information about how to perform quality edits in those five areas listed above.
3) Read the Claims Thread, here: http://www.shelfari.com/groups/51004/discussions/185648/Claims-Thread -- it explains how you can go about selecting a title properly so that we can track your work.
4) Work the title to the best of your abilities. Websites with useful book information are listed in the Resources Thread, here: http://www.shelfari.com/groups/51004/discussions/251891/Resources, and if there are any sections of the Book Detail Page that you think should be filled out but which you can't fill out, ask for help in the Bits & Pieces Thread here: http://www.shelfari.com/groups/51004/discussions/185863/Bits-Pieces---help-needed-thread.
5) WAIT until all your combination requests, title & author change requests, book separation requests, etc. have been processed, then go back and make sure none of your hard work has been altered by the approval process (which is why it's generally best to do this work BEFORE you add a ton of other information).
6) And when all that is done and you're happy with your results, notify us (through the process explained in the Claims Thread) so we can verify your work, mark the book completed and log your progress in the Hall of Fame! http://www.shelfari.com/groups/51004/discussions/251861/The-Hall-of-Fame
