Improve the "Authors" tab

For years now, I've been requesting more visibility of the "Country for the map" or "Author nationality" data - those with long memories may recall that at one point, we had a complete list available of which authors were from which countries, which disappeared at some point leaving us only with the pie chart listing the top few countries represented in our library, with no lists of authors or exposure of any country representing less than 5% or so of our library.

I was thinking today about ways that LT could expose this data, and it occurred to me that the "Authors" tab of the library - which currently shows only a list of authors, sortable either by books in your catalog or by name - could be converted into a tabular view exposing much of the information now on the author CK page.

I made a mockup of the sort of thing that could be done (all this is data for authors in my catalog, but I skip lots of authors to show more examples of different values for the fields. Obviously in the real catalog more things could be links.):

Right now you can get to the gender information and "Books in your catalog" easily, but dates and country (or nationality, but that's a more fraught term than "this person lives or lived in this country" so I'm avoiding it) require separately visiting each author page. It's important to note that I'm not suggesting creating any new fields - just making it easier to see things that are already present. Obviously "country for map" is not always clear, especially for authors from areas whose boundaries have changed since they were alive, but that issue is not created by this particular way of surfacing the data.

ooh, I like this idea!

+1 I love the idea and it would make my work on authors more gratifying

>1 lorax: Neato! +1 from me.

I agree with everyone above; this'd be neat to have.

>4 davidgn: Little national flags would be nice, too. http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/flags/ + some historical/edge cases

This would be so neat, thanks for submitting the idea.

>1 lorax: Very nice. The number of books of the author (in the rightmost column) could be a link to a search for them in your catalog.

<rant>
(This might hide somewhere in the current LT but I've never found it. When I'm writing a review for one of my books by say Georges Simenon, I always end up typing a search for the author rather than clicking on links, because I always get something else.)
(Hmm, this triggered some old idea of mine: to do some screenscraping to get a link for each author in the export file. (The problem is that you only get author name in the export files and this isn't always enough to identify the author. I.e. we need an Author_Id just like the Book_Id, but that's another kettle of fish))
</rant>

Still hoping something like this can be implemented at some point!

Thank you >1 lorax: and >2 al.vick: to >8 bnielsen:

Bump. Hoping that maybe the "Authors" library view gets looked at in the redesign, and something like this could be implemented.

This would be great!

Bump. Double-plus-good from me.

Bump

Don't know HOW I missed this before. Good idea.

👍

I would like to see "Compiler" added to the Author drop-down list. "Editor" or "Contributor" are closest but not close enough.

>17 B.S.M.: You can put in custom job titles.

Thanks Gilroy. I had not gone that far down the list.

Hoping this gets noticed by someone who can actually do something about it.

I'd missed this the first time 'round, and agree it's worthy of consideration in the LT2 redesign.

I especially like that it does not require any new fields. Based on New Series, the redesign could accommodate new functions and data elements, and those would be welcome! But a significant improvement could be managed with far less work, leveraging the data already available.

I like the idea and it's certainly worth considering. We'll see what Tim thinks of it when he returns next week. But just know that even if we don't roll it into the first version of LT2 that doesn't mean that we don't have plans for it. Just too much to do for what amounts to two developers.

Thanks!

Just keeping this from getting dormanted.

Hoping this stays on the radar screen.

Hoping it might be a part of redesign when they come to author pages. Conceptdawg said to bring up desired features of RMUC when they come around to it and this seems to me also design-related.

Keeping this visible....

Bump!

#Bump!To

Happy almost-second-birthday, RSI!

I would also like something that shows number of books read by each author (not owned) just read.

>31 dara85: I know it's not exactly what you're asking for, but if you go to the stats pages and go to the Author Pictures page (https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/authorgallery) you can select "Read In" dates to view authors of books you read in those years, and then you can select Count for Sort and it will sort the pictures by the number of books you've read by that author (the number of which will appear when you hover over the picture).

Bump. LT2 isn't fully implemented yet, so there's still hope....

I still have this one starred for when we get to the author pages (soon, I hope!).

Bump. While overall I'm dreading what LT2 will do to the catalog - the most information-dense part and the beating heart of the site, and the one that's most likely to be badly harmed by the change - the "authors" tab there can only be improved.

Kabump.