Bruji

Howdy ... Happy Holidays to all. I'm still learning the pedias and this Mac stuff. That said I have a question about the way authors are handled.

I imported about 700 books from Collectorz (windows) and have added a few others. I have many books by Robert Parker. Some are listed by Robert B. Parker, some by Robert Parker, some by Parker, Robert and one as Parker, Robert B. ....

I would assume that the differences are from the lookup source .... correct?

Can I change the author listing ... specifying either last name or first name first?

Thanks ... bruce

Sure. Select all the entries that you want to edit. Shift-click selects batches of entries; Cmd-click selects them in irregular order. Then Cmd-E, for Edit. Up comes a template that has all the data fields in it.

Go to Author field and enter the form that you prefer. (On his more recent books, he signs himself Robert B. Parker). Then hit Enter. Voila, all of the entries now have the same form.

This is a great way to clean up the database. Usually the names of publishers or place of publication are irregular, but Select, and then Cmd-E will let you edit the same field in multiple entries easily.

The different listings of the author name are because of the different lookup sources, correct. Amazon usually lists their authors as 'first name last name' but some of the other sites might list it differently.

Once you have standardized the author writing in your library the way druid has explained, you can choose to sort the author column by first name or last name by clicking on the column header with the Option key.

Druid, Conor ... thanks. The more I learn the better I like the pedias!

Take care ... bruce