author combining issue

https://www.librarything.com/author/mordvinoffnicolas

recently, i have read two caldecott books whose author as appears on both these books is
Wil & Nicolas

at the right side of page that name appears for combining. however, clearly nicolas illustrated other books with other authors. idk if will authored books without nicolas.

is there a way to delineate books authored by will & nicolas and also who these two guys were separately and combined?

I think the two are: Nicolas Mordvinoff and Will Lipkind, if that is any help to you or others in working this out.

>1 EGBERTINA:

at the right side of page that name appears for combining

What you see on the right side are merely suggestions, and, more often than not, they should not be combined. You will often see a suggestion to combine an editor with an author whose books he edited. Robert Maynard Hutchins' page is a good example. (Ordinarily, I would "never combine" the suggestions but am leaving it for the moment so you can see what I'm talking about.)

>3 lilithcat: my message- was just eaten. i feel like that is the second time today, and third time in a week. plz dont let this become a thing

i understand how it works- I'm just wondering if there isn't a better clarification for this situation

(my comments are going to be shorter because this is my second time typing with one hand in an uncomfortable position; no hostility is intended- except towards whatever ate my comment.)

mark twain is catalogued by twain- not clemens- but it is noted

the petershams wrote many books together- but they have last names

"will & nicolas" - have no last names- but they use it as though they are a single entity- such as fabio ( who clearly was born without the benefit of a last name)

i'm just muddling as to whether there is a way to acknowledge that nicolas illustrated some books with his last name; and illustrated some as "will & nicolas"- which is unusual

When a book is authored by two people you need to pick one to be the primary author

>5 jjwilson61: When a book is authored by two people you need to pick one to be the primary author

Which is unfair -- joint authors are both authors -- but it's also what is done with standard Library of Congress citations and such. If a book is by X and Y, but you look at the copyright/classification form at the front of the book, it starts with the first listed author and lists the other as "joint author" or the like.

There's no real difference between primary and main author. If a book has 2 main authors, primary will be calculated based on which one the majority entered as the first, and the other main author needs to be confirmed on the work page, but that's about it. Also, primary is used in situations when only one is listed, such as popup bubbles. They have the same status otherwise, that of the main author.

>6 waltzmn: Sure. But the DB is built that way so only one person can be in the field. Fair or not, like it or not, that’s the reality in LT.

>8 AnnieMod: Sure. But the DB is built that way so only one person can be in the field. Fair or not, like it or not, that’s the reality in LT.

I know, and I said as much. And LT is no worse than the Library of Congress, which does the same thing. I do wish the author field on the "Your Books" list showed all joint authors, though. That doesn't involve changes to the database, just changes to the code.

okay. i just changed the illustrator to the author. i had to combine my author to an earlier grouping of said author- because mine produced no other books.

not that i think millions of people are in danger of being confused by these guys or reading their books- which so far- are pretty, meh - but should we attribute the will and nick to both of them - in the other known names?

what is will's "canonical" what is his legal? etc? i entered him as william- which is how i found him when using last name; but others had last name combined with will. i have seen him as will when he had no last name. oy.

leave a disambiguation notice?

>9 waltzmn: If the author field allowed multiple entries it would no longer be sortable

>11 jjwilson61: If the author field allowed multiple entries it would no longer be sortable

Certainly it could be sorted -- in any of multiple ways; you just have to define it. Sort on the first author -- or sort by last name of the first author then the second author, e.g. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott's A Greek-English Lexicon could sort by LIDDELLHENRYGEORGESCOTTROBERT or by LIDDELLSCOTTHENRYGEORGEROBERT or by all sorts of things. Probably the first is the most straightforward, but it's just code! The name already needs to be munged to upper case and, I believe, have diacriticals removed, so that Moller and MOLLER and Möller and MÖLLER (e.g.) sort together rather than sorting as MOLLER Moller MÖLLER Möller, which I believe would be the sort order if names were sorted by strict unicode sequence.

Sort is a bleepity-bleep difficult code operation that has exercised algorithm designers for many decades (look up, e.g. "Bubble sort" and "Quicksort" and "Container sort"); the easiest part is getting the data into the form you want to use to sort it.

What I meant was that it wouldn't be sorted. Since LT doesn't allow any other multiple value field to be sorted I doubt this one would be any different

>13 jjwilson61: What I meant was that it wouldn't be sorted. Since LT doesn't allow any other multiple value field to be sorted I doubt this one would be any different.

But this is not relevant. Display is display; data is data; code is code; they are not the same.

They can put the full data in the display field and sort on the lead author, or they can sort on both authors, in all sorts of ways. Most sort routines allow you to sort on multiple fields, even if LibraryThing doesn't do it. So LibraryThing could do something like

SORT($FirstAuthor,$SecondAuthorAuthor,ASCENDING);

or it could do

$SortingName:=$FirstAuthor&$SecondAuthor;
SORT($SortingName,ASCENDING);

or it could just say replace the Author field with something like
$DisplayAuthor="";
ForEach Author in {OtherAuthors}
   $DisplayAuthor:=$DisplayAuthor&OtherAuthors(Author);

and then just sort as it always did. (Note: The above is pseudocode, not based on anything in the actual LibraryThing system, but every significant programming language since the Pascal and C I was working with in 1985 has all the relevant features.)

Maybe LT won't, because it's not relevant to most people, but they can, probably easily.