Wrong library description

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Wrong library description

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12wonderY
aug 6, 2018, 9:54 am

For the non-fiction book Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing, the automatic library description is:

"Dortmunder has a job offer. He's been hired by third parties to pull off heists in the past, but never to lay his hands on anything this peculiar. Frankly, it's a bone. Not just any bone. A femur. Well, not just any femur, either. A femur which, 800 years ago, was part of a 16-year-old girl who, having been killed and eaten by her own family, was made a saint by the Church. The femur, her only relic, is all that's left. Now two small eastern European countries - Tsergovia and Votskojek - are fighting like dogs over...well, the bone. There's only room for one of them in the United Nations General Assembly, and the choice is in the hands of a powerful Catholic prelate. The country that tosses him the bone is sure to be in like Flynn."

Is there some mechanism for correcting this?

My public library's description of the book is thus:

"Rationing: it's a word--and idea--that people often loathe and fear. Health care expert Henry Aaron has compared mentioning the possibility of rationing to "shouting an obscenity in church." Yet societies in fact ration food, water, medical care, and fuel all the time, with those who can pay the most getting the most. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has said, the results can be "thoroughly unequal and nasty."

In Any Way You Slice It , Stan Cox shows that rationing is not just a quaint practice restricted to World War II memoirs and 1970s gas station lines. Instead, he persuasively argues that rationing is a vital concept for our fragile present, an era of dwindling resources and environmental crises. Any Way You Slice It takes us on a fascinating search for alternative ways of apportioning life's necessities, from the goal of "fair shares for all" during wartime in the 1940s to present-day water rationing in a Mumbai slum, from the bread shops of Cairo to the struggle for fairness in American medicine and carbon rationing on Norfolk Island in the Pacific. Cox's question: can we limit consumption while assuring everyone a fair share?

The author of Losing Our Cool , the much debated and widely acclaimed examination of air-conditioning's many impacts, here turns his attention to the politically explosive topic of how we share our planet's resources."

2lorax
aug 6, 2018, 10:12 am

I recognize the book that's actually a description of; Don't Ask by Donald Westlake.

https://www.librarything.com/work/337452

The description says it's from ISBN 1595588094 which is for Any Way you Slice It, and does not occur for Don't Ask on LT. That means some library somewhere has the ISBN wrong for "Don't Ask" and it's getting pulled in. Library descriptions are automatic so there's no way for users to fix this, since it's not a combination or ISBN re-use issue.

3WBCP
aug 8, 2018, 10:33 pm

I have a similar problem, where the library description is completely off. It says it is based on ISBN number but if I pull in the book via Amazon, should it not link the description to the Amazon description instead of a random other place from the internet?

4MarthaJeanne
aug 9, 2018, 2:33 am

The work information is based on the work not your individual copy.

5lorannen
aug 9, 2018, 11:32 am

Tim fixed a couple other incorrect library descriptions earlier (see: https://www.librarything.com/topic/292700)—looks like that didn't catch this one. I'll see if he has time for one more.

62wonderY
jan 19, 2019, 1:59 pm

>5 lorannen: Apparently no time, as it is still incorrect.

A description from Amazon for Grace Richmond's book On Christmas Day in the Morning incorrectly references the Pearl S. Buck book.

In this case, the library description below it is correct.

7StJosephIssaquah
Redigeret: jul 23, 2019, 10:29 am

Another error:
"Confessions" by St. Augustine has 32 "Library Descriptions" listed. Unfortunately, the first one, which is used on my TinyCat and all my editions of this book, is wrong. It looks like two of the 32 descriptions are about something other than "Confessions" but 30 are correct. Besides the first incorrect one, the other listing that is wrong reads: "In seventy-six chapters he traces philosophy from the rise of Greek civilization to the emergence of logical analysis in the twentieth century. (summary from ISBN 0800787625)"

Could you fix these errors so we have correct description? (It is in almost 16,000 LT libraries).

Here's the link:http://www.librarything.com/work/book/124887458

8lorannen
jul 23, 2019, 10:56 am

>7 StJosephIssaquah: Can you be more specific beyond "the first one"? Is the text of it this: "Dedicated to truth and the celebration of his individuality, the eighteenth-century French philosopher reexamines his life, ideals, and experiences", or is it another?

9MarthaJeanne
Redigeret: jul 23, 2019, 11:21 am

That sounds more like The confessions by Rousseau than Confessions by Augustine. WorldCat says the ISBN is Augustine, so the library has it wrong.

102wonderY
aug 27, 2019, 11:10 am

https://www.librarything.com/work/19153896/book/172549117

Dang! Libraries are sourcing Goodreads for Library Descriptions, and they land here.

11lilithcat
aug 27, 2019, 12:27 pm

>10 2wonderY:

Oh, yuck.