Merging similar data

[Nsgirl71]

Sorry, my subject line is confusing, I don't know what to call this.

I have started adding books and am finding that the search often returns the same data but spelled slightly differently for different books. For example, I have a number of books from Scholastic, some come back as "scholastic" some as "Scholastic" some as "Scholastic Inc.", etc. Similar things are happening with genre, subjects, and pretty much every field.

When I am done entering all the books, will I be able to somehow go into the list of genres, subjects, publishers, etc. and merge 'scholastic' and 'Scholastic' and 'Scholastic Inc.', etc. Or will I need to edit all the books.

I hope you can figure out what I'm talking about, I know I'm not being very clear.

[Nora]

You'll find the autofill lists for genre, publisher, etc. in the Preferences/Autofill. That's also where you can edit them to display only the data you'd like to see.

[Conor]

You can edit multiple books at once to edit all the genres, publishers and other fields quickly. First click on the table column header for one of the fields, this will group all the books with similar fields together "Scholastic" "Scholastic, Inc" and "scholastic" will all be in a contiguous group. With shift held down you can click on the first Scholastic and the last one to select the entire group. Then use the edit option (from the toolbar, menu or the shortcut command-e). This will open a multiple edit window, locate the publisher field and type your favorite version "Scholastic" and click OK. This will update all the current entries to be consistent. Repeat for the other fields you would like to update.

Also in the autofill preference that Nora mentioned above has a button that reads, "Rebuild". This is a useful button that will recreate all the possible values for the selected field from what is currently in your database. If after using the rebuild button there are still several version of Scholastic, it would mean at least one book still has a different spelling.

[Nsgirl71]

Thank you for the suggestions. I'm just dumping everything in the database to begin, and I will clean up the different fields after everything is entered. Both these tips will be helpful. I currently have 12 different variations on Scholastic

I don't supposed Scholastic has a database you could search for entries? A lot of the school market versions did not return cover art.

Can you tell that Scholastic makes up a large percentage of our library

[Conor]

We were recently looking at Scholastic specifically for a more accurate reading level for books. Although they do have an online catalog they unfortunately don't have one with access for a computer program.