Quality Check giving weird results

[LadyKate]

I'm using calibre 1.47 and have a library of almost 90 000 books.

I was trying to use Quality Check to test for errors in author_sort.

I can't seem to get it to only search the selected book. The plugin seems to want to search the entire library.

When going through the subset of marked:invalid_author_sort I find several which are not invalid. Others are in all caps while the author is in title case or other (as in McC names).

I am finding it quite frustrating and wondering what I can do to a) select a subset of my library to check and b) get only those items with errors showing.

[LadyKate]

Ok, found the setting for just selected BUT finding more weirdness with author sort.

While editing metadata for author Elyzabeth M. Valey I click on the arrow to copy over to author sort and get VaLey, Elyzabeth M.

More weirdness with author Dennis L. McKiernan when I click on the arrow to copy to author sort I get Mckiernan, Dennis L..

I don't know what is causing the change in case in these. It is quite a pain.
As author sort is used when doing a copy to disk this is quite a pain.

Also, for all the St. James or whatever and Le Guin or whatever is there any way to have a list of those authors?

[stanking]

Originally Posted by LadyKate

While editing metadata for author Elyzabeth M. Valey I click on the arrow to copy over to author sort and get VaLey, Elyzabeth M.

More weirdness with author Dennis L. McKiernan when I click on the arrow to copy to author sort I get Mckiernan, Dennis L..

I don't know what is causing the change in case in these. It is quite a pain.
As author sort is used when doing a copy to disk this is quite a pain.

Also, for all the St. James or whatever and Le Guin or whatever is there any way to have a list of those authors?

My guess is that this is what shows up as the author sort in your database. If you right-click on Authors and select "Manage Authors", you'll get a list you can edit, which will then affect the proper sort for these authors (only in the current database). If the first book by McKiernan originally listed him as Mckiernan when imported, that was the default sort entered. Once you modify it, all McKiernan books will recognize the change. You can make the same manual modification for Le Guin, St. James, ab Hugh, da Vinci, etc.

All the Quality Check does is check to see that each individual book matches what is currently set in the author sort table - what you see in the Manage Authors window. If the sort isn't what you want, Quality Check isn't going to help.

[BetterRed]

stanking

On the last point a search for the following will give you the list

authors:"St. " or authors:"Le "

I would correct the author_sort (so that LN is St. James and Le Guin etc) in Manage Authors.

BR

[LadyKate]

I could maybe figure that is the problem BUT why does Hugh Aldersey-Williams change to Hugh Aldersey-williams when I click to correct the author sort? Why is Aldersey-Williams, Hugh even flagged as being incorrect. This is an author with only the one book. I am very confused. I had been keeping fairly up to date with making corrections and all of a sudden have a couple of thousand flagged and incorrect. Most of these are capitalization of MaC and McC etc.Very weird.

[LadyKate]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

stanking

On the last point a search for the following will give you the list

authors:"St. " or authors:"Le "

I would correct the author_sort (so that LN is St. James and Le Guin etc) in Manage Authors.

BR

I wish there was a way to "flag" these authors as being correct versus seeing red when editing or doing a check. Something like the duplicate checker has for ignoring duplicates

[stanking]

If you manually change the author sort in the Edit Metadata, all it changes is the record for one specific book. What Quality Check does is compare that book to a central table that matches author and author sort. Even if you list a book with "Hugh Aldersey-Williams" as the author and "Aldersey-Williams, Hugh" as the author sort, Quality Check will flag it if the Manage Authors table lists the author sort as "Hugh Aldersey-williams". In other words, it's not the record for the individual book that's the problem; it's the table that matches authors to author sorts.

While you've got one of those books in the Edit Metadata dialog, click the "Manage Authors" icon to the left of the author. Then check to see that the listing there is what you want. Then rerun Quality Check.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by LadyKate

I could maybe figure that is the problem BUT why does Hugh Aldersey-Williams change to Hugh Aldersey-williams when I click to correct the author sort? Why is Aldersey-Williams, Hugh even flagged as being incorrect. This is an author with only the one book. I am very confused. I had been keeping fairly up to date with making corrections and all of a sudden have a couple of thousand flagged and incorrect. Most of these are capitalization of MaC and McC etc.Very weird.

Title case (and splitting) is dumb.

Sometimes you need to hand edit the sort in Manage Authors (not individual books) for wide spread usage.

Also (books) Language Rules applies (see the Tweaks sorting rules)

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by LadyKate

I wish there was a way to "flag" these authors as being correct versus seeing red when editing or doing a check. Something like the duplicate checker has for ignoring duplicates

If you use Manage Authors and enter what YOU want in it's Author Sort column it will persist and apply to all books by that Author for now and forever.

I found the whole 'author thing' a darn sight easier once I started doing all my single book metadata editing on the spreadsheet and I discovered Manage Authors.

I display the value of author-sort in Book Details so after entering a new author name I can glance at the Books Details to see if I approve of its value, and if I don't, I fix it via Manage Authors. If I had a keyboard shortcut or context menu item to access Manage Authors I'd wouldn't have to futz with the mouse...

BR

[stanking]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

If you use Manage Authors and enter what YOU want in its Author Sort column it will persist and apply to all books by that Author for now and forever.

And that is the easiest way to manage it. I'll add one caveat: With multiple libraries, you have to do this for each library. I've found that if you set, for example, "Ursula K Le Guin" to sort to "Le Guin, Ursula K", when you move The Left Hand of Darkness to a different database, it will sort as "Guin, Ursula K Le" unless you've already got a book by her in the new library. So after moving it, you have to Manage Authors in the new library.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by stanking

And that is the easiest way to manage it. I'll add one caveat: With multiple libraries, you have to do this for each library. I've found that if you set, for example, "Ursula K Le Guin" to sort to "Le Guin, Ursula K", when you move The Left Hand of Darkness to a different database, it will sort as "Guin, Ursula K Le" unless you've already got a book by her in the new library. So after moving it, you have to Manage Authors in the new library.

I address that this way.

After I move books from my Receiving library to the Target library, I do a search on tags:"=_New", and apply my _New View; it displays authors and a derived custom custom called #my_authors_sort - so it pretty easy to pick up any author_sort anomalies - I get quite a few because of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese etc names.

BR