Cleaning up chain listings

Almost finished standardizing the Barnes & Noble entries - making sure most of the entries say "Barnes & Noble Booksellers" with the location name, like the way it's listed on the BN website. (With the exceptions of the main store and the college bookstores, which name themselves differently.)

Interesting point: Many of the locations where all the info wasn't entered, or that were duplicate listings, were entered by authors who had events at that store they wanted to promote.

Looking through Borders now - looks like the Borders website changed the formatting of their URLs, so now all of the links to the specific locations don't work. I'm fixing a few as I come across them, but I can't do all 473.

That's a bummer. Your plan sounds great. If I come across any, I'll remember to check and update the link(s). Thanks for the heads up.

Well, thank you for whatever help you can offer.

Right now I'm updating the Borders entries toward the format "Borders - Location Name," since that's consistent with the majority of what we have in the database right now and it's sort of consistent with what the Borders website has.

(Right now the Borders website reads "Location Name - Borders" but that doesn't make sense for our system. I am however, making sure that "Borders Express" and "Borders Airport" are reflected in the entries we have here.)

In addition to changing the links, each store now has a personalized message about themselves, probably written by the store manager. It's actually quite nice and gives each store more of a identity beyond "Borders #268." I haven't really been putting these in our system, except in cases where our entries read stuff like, "Sells crap" and the system hates when you blank stuff out without putting new data in (sometimes it reverts to whatever you took out).

As a sidenote, I also standardized the entries for Books Kinokuniya (and checked the websites to verify that in other countries, it is in fact called that). While I was checking that I noticed we are missing most of the Kino stores in Japan and ALL of the stores in Taiwan. Anyone want to take a crack at either of those countries?

I tried to do a few today, and this is, unfortunately, not working well for me. To do just one is take an *impossibly* long time to load. I shall be happy to help you at random, but cannot do a systemized assistance with you. I simply cannot sit here for such a long time to just change one link! I'm very sorry, but do hope others will join in your effort.

I'm not giving up, but cannot give you the help that you really need to do a good job of this. My regrets.

Please, everyone, join lampbane in efforts to update the Borders links. In the end, this task will help everyone.

P.S. I actually added the manager's comments to the few I did. I like them. They really address how each store is unique. Good idea on Border's part, I think!

Every time I edit a store, I open it up in a new tab. That way I can keep the list of Borders open without having to reload it every single time.

But yeah, the speed is killing me. Luckily I'm only doing this in the background anyway.

Also of note, that Borders now seems to offer WiFi at most locations now.

If all the URL's changed in some standard way, perhaps Tim could be persuaded to write a script to make the changes to the database all at once.

It's not a huge deal, as this is an opportunity to clean up the Borders entries in general - many are missing phone numbers or zip codes. I've also found a few duplicates.

Finished with the Borders entries; but only the names. About half still need new URLs.

Also fixed the names for Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, Chapters, Indigo, and Coles.

Now going to give Waterstones a crack.

Waterstone's is finished, though I'm wondering if the names should be printed as "Waterstone's" or "Waterstones" (it was the latter in the database).

EDIT: Also put the Taiwan Books Kinokuniya in the system, though two of the locations are reading as the same address. Bah.

It's been about a year, so we're overdue for another cleanup. Much easier than last year, really just had to fix any new entries, and there were a few locations here and there that have closed since they were last checked.

Chains I've done:

Barnes & Noble Booksellers
B. Dalton
Borders
Waldenbooks
Follett's
Chapters
Indigo
Coles
Waterstone's
WHSmith
Blackwell
Maruzen
Kinokuniya
BOOKOFF

We're seriously underrepresented with the Follett's, possibly because most of the stores are in the system but just labelled with the University name. That's fine because the Follett's thing is just a licensing deal and a year later some of the stores could be Barnes and Noble.