internetarchive / internetarchive/openlibrary

Display pen name of an author in the "add author" field in addition to real name

Open
#7,288 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Affects: Librarians Lead: @cdrini Priority: 3 Type: Feature Request
Dominant language
Python
Stars
6.7k
Forks
2k
Avg merge
2d 19h
Merged PRs (30d)
138

Description

When I edit a work or add a book, I can also add an author. The library suggests me author profiles that might fit, depending on the author name I already entered. This displays always the author profile name.

During the last community call, @mheiman mentioned that this is confusing for editors. They will usually add the pen name (written on the book) instead of our author profile name. It might be possible that this also leads to duplicate works, if someone was not aware of a pen name and thought he had a book with the same title from another author.

### Describe the problem that you'd like solved

When someone searches for a pen name, the small pop up result should read:
Richard Bachman
(pen name of: Stephen King)
- additional library data that helps in identifying the correct author -

Ideally, the pen name should also be shown as author of this book in search results and on the work page.

### Proposal & Constraints

Many of the web 2.0 pages that create parts of the display "on the fly" work like this.

We do have a list of pseudonyms in the author field. There also exists an "Also known as" entry in the contributors list. If we match those, we should be able to save the author's pen name without losing the connection to the main author profile. We would need to find a way to automatically enter the correct pseudonym into the contributors list, though.

### Additional context

### Stakeholders

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.