Awards, honors, distinctions, etc.

We're about to debut our new awards system—a significant improvement on the last. On another post ( https://www.librarything.com/topic/353550 ) SandraArdnas asked for a division between Awards and Honors. And there was another recent discussion of awards, honors and lists ( https://www.librarything.com/topic/353536 ).

My view—and I'm sticking with it—is nearly what davidgn said on the latter:

In my book, X encompasses anything a publisher would list among the distinctions one of their books has received.

I say "nearly" because he wrote "honors" and I want to be less specific and say that it applies to "the feature we are building," but that we can come up with different sub-types, such as awards and honors.

So, how would you divide the world of "lists of distinctions that publishers use to promote their books"? How many types and what's in them?

Some cases to consider:

1. Straight-up awards, like Hugo, Booker, Caldecott, Academy Awards, etc. — given out regularly through a process of some sort.
2. Best-of lists regularly given out, like Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, The Economist Best Books. There's a lot of blur here between #1 and #2.
3. "Stars" like Kirkus Review Starred Review, Booklist Starred Review
4. One-time lists in newspapers and magazines, like 100 Essential New England Books (Boston Globe), Guardian 1000 ("1000 novels everyone must read"); note that sometimes these are rebooted and done again.
5. Lists in books like 25 Books Every Christian Should Read (currently at https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/25+Books+Every+Christian+Should+Read%3A+A...
6. New York Times Bestseller lists, Whitcoulls

Go ahead and add some more!

My thinking is:
* 1-2 "Award"
* 3-6 "Honor" or maybe "Distinction"

What's yours? One thing is off the table—moving lots of things into lists. If some dude used awards to keep track of his books, okay. But anything that might reasonably be considered a feather in the cap of an author and their publisher belongs within this system.

>1 timspalding: I'm okay with 1-2 as awards, 3 as an honor, and 4 and 6 as distinction or maybe call them distinguished lists?

I'm not big on 5 being included since you get "awards" like https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Reading+the+world+in+196+books, which is literally just a list of books Ann Morgan considered for her reading project.

I like your categories, but I think it's going to be hard to explain to users entering a new thing what's an award, what's an honor and what's a distinction.

Nominated and voted on? It's an award.
Everything else is a designation.

I'm liking the breakdown of >2 amanda4242: myself. Awards, Honors, and Reading Lists.

Because of how things are in the system at the moment, I don't think they should rate above Reading List.

Also, there is a question of how do we deal with the edge cases like this one:
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/The+Lewis+Department+of+Humanities+at+the....
It could be seen as an honor or Distinguished Item, but does it belong in the new system?

>4 lesmel:

Assuming we want two categories (which I suspect is necessary to avoid too many backward compatibility problems), I like lesmel's classification of "voted on"/"not voted on," although the the names "awards" and "distinctions" seems pretty good to me. Three classifications strikes me as too hard for newcomers.

Does it matter who votes? Does an editorial board count? How about Mr. Smith's 6th grade class?

>4 lesmel: This is fine except the inevitable everything including the kitchen sink will get thrown in under the "designation/honor" because while Tim's belief that anything a publisher/author would consider honors/distinctions should be accommodated, that's very Pollyanna like thinking and impractical because the tendency to stretch those definitions beyond anything remotely reasonable is the norm today. I hope you're(LT) prepared to normalize "Distinctions/Honors" like "An Amazon Top 50 Thriller", "Amazon Editor's Pick", "The Best Books of 2023 So Far (Amazon Editors)", "Best Book of September 2023 (Ages 3-5)", "Random Book Club Name here Selection of the Month" "#5 Best Seller in Mysteries" and about ten thousand other designations from Retail Sales Lists, suggested Reading Lists, Book Club selections, etc.

Personally I don't see why what the "thing" is in the real world shouldn't translate to the same "thing" on LT.

Any "List" should be a list on LT. Bestseller, reading lists of any kind. Easiest way to determine is the content singular or multiple, multiple = list

Any Award should be an Award on LT. Something singular that was awarded some prize or official recognition

An "Honor/Distinction" should be related to unachieved awards in some way, e.g. titles that didn't win aka honorable mention, runner up, finalist etc. The old "It was an honor to be nominated..."

Anyway, just my opinion. It will be interesting to watch unfold and if the new system starts cluttering up any titles I have cataloged at the work level I can just stop using LT altogether. I've probably gotten my $100 of lifetime membership sunk cost back at this point. It's already bad enough having to clean up the CK now with people misusing the fields instead of using tags at their book level to track idiosyncratic info important to them but not necessarily to the general public. Work level data should be lean and mean, not an info dump cluttered mess.

>8 Taliesien: Except that >1 timspalding: very distinctly said One thing is off the table—moving lots of things into lists.
And what you're asking is moving a LOT of things from Awards to Lists.

Those Distinctions/Honors that you're talking down about (Amazon Top 50, etc) are already here in the awards section. So no worries about it being normallized. It was done many many years ago.

>5 gilroy:

Oh, for pete's sake. How is a class required reading list an "honor"? Sheesh.

1-2: Awards
3: Starred reviews. Shouldn't those belong in Reviews?
4-6: Some other thing (that isn't an award and also isn't moved into Lists), whatever you want to call it

>1 timspalding: Very limited subset of the "awards" zoo, I'm afraid. OK, I'm gonna clear my schedule for a bit tomorrow and throw together a few dozen sample items so we can have a proper crack at taxonomy.

>10 lilithcat: The same way being on any reading list is an honor. Someone saw it as such.
I've wanted to delete that one every time I see it, but I also try to not remove data entered by others unless it's painfully wrong.

Even if I agree with >2 amanda4242:, probably the distinction Award/Honors is the simplest to explain to the casual user, as >4 lesmel: did.

>13 gilroy:

The same way being on any reading list is an honor. Someone saw it as such.

Yeah, no. Someone was following the curriculum set down by the school board 20 years ago. Or it's the chemistry text the professor wrote.

I'd personally prefer if awards were separate on their own. There are never so many for a given book then to be impractical to include that column in catalogue view. Also, they work differently from any lists, so I'd assume having a slightly different interface if needed would be a plus too, as is the fact that it's easy to distinguish what should go where for both veterans and newbies.

To add to defining awards to >4 lesmel:, they are awarded on some sort of regular basis, annually, biannually, etc, and there's generally has one winner and a few runnerups.

As for honors, do we really go the route to keep everything? I've come across multiple that are obviously a personal 'best of' of list of some kind. If not, some guidelines what's considered too liberal an interpretation of honor or distinction is needed.

If we come up with a distinction, I'd be happy to have the catalog show you them individually or together. Right now there is no distinction—you get the NYT and Amazon bestsellers in with the Booker.

I am also trying to distinguish between "top" awards and lesser ones, and let you see only the former if you want. Because this is also a problem for clutter. There's no question that outfits like the Western Montana School Teachers have an award. We should both allow and encourage that. But it's not quite on the same level as the Booker.

How about this?

1–2. Awards
4-5. Recommended Reading
3, 6. Distinctions

>17 SandraArdnas: I've come across multiple that are obviously a personal 'best of' of list of some kind.

Depends on what you mean by "personal." I haven't come across any that are truly personal. But a lot are from published books and articles.

>18 timspalding: 'screen name' top 100 of all time type of thing. Some bloggers top 100, is it worth keeping, for instance, or do we try to maintain at least some curating what we want listed

>19 SandraArdnas: Can you point me to where an LT user has made an award after themselves?

>20 timspalding: Not of the top of my head, but the point is do we have some bottom line what qualifies to be included, like published reviews have for instance

>21 SandraArdnas:

I don't like litigating imaginary cases, still less getting upset about them. We can certainly insist that members can't just make their own lists—an insistence all the easier because it's not happening. But there are blogs that really matter, overall and within some community, and their lists of bests are as important or unimportant as something from the Guardian. I don't see that we should pretend that all newspapers are more important than all blogs. And I don't think we should gut the awards system of best-of lists, when so many users put them in and they are useful and interesting to a lot of members.

>22 timspalding: I'm not sure why you'd think I'd make it up, especially since you don't question bloggers making their lists and that is what I pointed to. Either way, I take from this the answer is anything goes.

timspalding (#22):

I don't think SandraArdnas is talking about LT members, I think she's talking about a random book blogger making a list of their Best Books of 2022, and then an LT member entering it as an award. Are you saying that this is OK as long as the person entering the award isn't the blogger in question, but if they are it's not?

>22 timspalding:

there are blogs that really matter,

How do we decide which blogs "really matter", or, for that matter, which authors' or academics' "best" lists matter?

Here's one by a librarian: https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Philip+Ward%27s+Lifetime+Reading+Plan, which the creator admits is "not an award, but a list".

What about this "amateur human being and professional free thinker"?
https://www.scaruffi.com/service/about.html
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Best+Indian+novels+by+Piero+Scaruffi
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Best+Works+of+Literature+by+Piero+Scaruff...

I find this one odd: https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Greatest+Books+algorithm

>24 lorax: Yes, I don't know whether a blogger in question is a member or another member decided to put that blogger's list, just that the list name suggests it's something of the sort. Never really delved into any of those, just noticed them occasionally on some of my books, but really don't feel like going through my library to find an example. Either there's a general principle what belongs and what's too much or there isn't with or without an example anyway.

>13 gilroy: It was a baseball text. And in Humanities.
As I said, I debated deleting it a lot.

https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Brothers+Judd+Top+100+Novels+of+the+20th+...
I mean this one fits in with the >17 SandraArdnas: question. Who is Brother Judd and why does he get a top 100 novel's list?

Also searching for Top 100, you get authors who just enter "Top 100 in Sales" with no clarification where. (I'd assume Amazon, but can't tell.)

>28 gilroy: "The brothers" is a guy who graduated from Colgate in the '80s and lives with wife and kids in Vermont working in the GIS field. And, apparently, his brother.
Looks like some guy wrote them up in Catholic Exchange at one point.
http://brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/static.home/page/driscollprofile

*shrugs*

Overall, I get that some of you want LibraryThing to gut its awards because you don't like blogs, lists of bests from newspapers and magazines, bestseller lists, starred reviews, etc. We're not going to do it. The data is interesting and useful to a lot of people, and members put time into it.

But we can separate them into categories, which is why I'm asking what categories you'd like to separate them into.

If you want to gut some of the above, tell me your criterion. It needs to be really clear, and not eliminate useful and interesting stuff.

Who is Brother Judd and why does he get a top 100 novel's list?

Here's the Library of Congress' entry for the Brothers Judd blog. https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0011657/

Also searching for Top 100, you get authors who just enter "Top 100 in Sales" with no clarification where.

Certainly that should be removed as junk.

How do we decide which blogs "really matter", or, for that matter, which authors' or academics' "best" lists matter?

Yes, exactly. What's your answer?

>24 lorax: I don't think SandraArdnas is talking about LT members, I think she's talking about a random book blogger making a list of their Best Books of 2022, and then an LT member entering it as an award. Are you saying that this is OK as long as the person entering the award isn't the blogger in question, but if they are it's not?

Okay, what's your answer?

>25 lilithcat: I find this one odd: https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Greatest+Books+algorithm

It's apparently from the website https://thegreatestbooks.org

This list is generated from 130 "best of" book lists from a variety of great sources. An algorithm is used to create a master list based on how many lists a particular book appears on. Some lists count more than others. I generally trust "best of all time" lists voted by authors and experts over user-generated lists. On the lists that are actually ranked, the book that is 1st counts a lot more than the book that's 100th. If you're interested in the details about how the rankings are generated and which lists are the most important(in my eyes) please check out the list details page.

First major thought process:

Award - Anything that has Award or Prize in its name. So Pulitzer, Hugo, Academy, etc.
Lists - Anything that claims to be a reading list or has List in its name. So NYT Best Seller, 1001 Books to read, etc.
Honors - Best of Year or other similar. (Potentially overlapping with Award.)

I'm guessing with the new system Short Lists, Long Lists, and Nominations will be merged into the prime item listing. Just as a guess.
I think the various awards that were broken out as separate lists (Pitchfork's Best Albums of {Year}) should all be merged under one list with yearly separators.

This allows all things that exist to be moved into proper levels, without eliminating things.

>30 timspalding:

It's apparently from the website https://thegreatestbooks.org

Okay, but who is "I"? ("I generally trust . . . ")

>32 lilithcat: A guy named Shane Sherman. No bio I could find. Someone thinks his list is pretty cool, though.
https://auxiliarymemory.com/2013/02/13/identifying-the-greatest-books-of-all-tim...

>30 timspalding: Overall, I get that some of you want LibraryThing to gut its awards because you don't like blogs, lists of bests from newspapers and magazines, bestseller lists, starred reviews, etc.

Personally, once it's separated from awards I don't care all that much what stays and what goes, if anything (and even if it isn't separated I don't care because culling as much as half wouldn't make the difference for catalogue view). So the question is really, truly, whether some are just noise in what is already lots and lots of data. Many of us we'll go through this stuff once the new system is in place, so aside from consolidating existing data, we can also delete what needs deleting. Once I go through items in my catalogue in this way, I will probably not return to do the same for a long time, so if I'm to do anything, now is the time to ask. That is all as far as I'm concerned.

>31 gilroy: I'm thinking the interface will be similar to series in the sense that we will be able to switch those categories just like series vs publisher series. The 3 you list look good as categories to me, plus it seems as straightforward as possible what should go where.

>30 timspalding: "Overall, I get that some of you want LibraryThing to gut its awards because you don't like blogs, lists of bests, bestseller lists and such. We're not going to do it."

I find it fascinating that you are unable/unwilling to articulate a reason you won't do it though. Equates to a parent telling a questioning child, "because I said so" which as the grand poobah of the site is definitely your prerogative, just very disappointing I have to say. Despite overwhelming empirical data supporting the assertions by many here that things that are nothing more than random, whimsical and often trivial lists in the real world have been elevated to an undeserved status by mis-categorizing them as awards and/or honors instead of the fundamental lists that they are, defined as such by their own creators. I could understand your position somewhat if LT didn't have a feature called Lists and there was no other way of capturing that information but...well that's not the current situation is it? Tracking "List" works on LT Lists doesn't reduce the visibility of that info at the work level by categorizing them as such since Lists are just as visible on the work (more so even as they are separate from CK) page as Awards. Information isn't lost and functionality is improved because the right tool for the task (entering external lists into LT lists) would be utilized. LT is basically a data classification website (as is any core real world Library function) and yet it seems wedded to mis-classification in this instance.

https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Western+World%27s+Greatest+Books+-+Projec...
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Philip+Ward%27s+Lifetime+Reading+Plan
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/The+New+Lifetime+Reading+Plan+With+Going+...
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Harold+Bloom%27s+Western+Canon
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Borges%27+A+Personal+Library
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Harvard+Bookstore+Top+100
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/1%2C000+Books+to+Read+Before+You+Die+Page...
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Reading+the+world+in+196+books
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/ALA+Outstanding+Books+for+the+College+Bou...
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/A+Catholic+Lifetime+Reading+Plan
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Publishers+Weekly+Bestseller
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Somerset+Maugham%E2%80%99s+10+greatest+no...

I fear >23 SandraArdnas: was correct though and a continuation of anything goes is the answer in which case what is even the point in laboring over proper definitions/labels since subjectivity seems to trump them anyway.

>36 Taliesien: "I find it fascinating that you are unable/unwilling to articulate a reason you won't do it though."

But he did. In the sentence immediately after your quote: "The data is interesting and useful to a lot of people, and members put time into it."

You may disagree with the reason but that is different from someone not articulating one.

>18 timspalding:
1–2. Awards
4-5. Recommended Reading
3, 6. Distinctions

This works for me, if it's possible to implement it. In fact, I like it.

I foresee implementation problems, though, at least for things already entered. This whole discussion makes me think of one of my own books, The Minnesota Heritage Songbook. This was published with funds from the State of Minnesota; it wasn't just a vanity book. And the year after it was published, it won "The Minnesota Alliance of Local History Museums Minnesota History Award." That is, in one sense, a serious award -- I got a plaque and a free dinner out of it; in its field, the book was respected.

But has anyone ever heard of The Minnesota Alliance of Local History Museums Minnesota History Award? I had never heard of it before I won it! So I entered the award myself, because I'm quite sure I'm the only LibraryThing member to know it exists. :-)

So: Should I be allowed to place awards on my own book? And should an award that only I know about be listed? The fact that the award is legitimate doesn't change the fact that this is arguably a problem....

>37 AnnieMod: And I've seen no one arguing that the data isn't interesting or useful to some users, just that it shouldn't be mis-classified as something it's not. Moving list designations from Awards to Lists doesn't lose any data or usefulness. It simply moves it to the correct category. So no, he hasn't articulated a reason, merely straw manned an argument nobody has made.

>18 timspalding:
My response is hampered by being ignorant of how you're thinking of presenting them, and unfamiliar with some (most) of the honors. In particular (2&3) are hard to classify because it looks like - for any particular period - sometimes there is only one starred review or Best of, and sometimes more than one?

Awards There can be only one
(To me an Award is when, for its designated period and category, there is one winner) - I'm not sure how you'd "distinguish between 'top' awards and lesser ones", or cater to potential extraordinary "draws" (like the not unprecedented but rare shared gold medal).

other honors/distinctions There are more than one sharing the same distinction
for their designated period (could be annual or "ever") & category.
Includes:
unranked long-lists, short-lists,
unordered Recommended Reading
and Ranked Distinctions,
and maybe not ranked but presented ordered Recommended Reading,

>39 Taliesien:

I think Tim's argument is pretty strong: somehow, the software has to work. Moving the data around can't be done by hand; there is too much data. It has to be done in software. Moving stuff around in the way you describe -- I wouldn't touch that with a coding staff twice as large as LT's.

Adding "accolades" to the list as an option instead of (or in addition to) honors/distinctions.

>41 waltzmn:
>39 Taliesien: We certainly COULD move list data into Lists. The problem really is making those distinctions. This process at least gives us those distinctions (awards vs honors vs lists) but it will take time for the data to be correctly designated. Without the designations there is just too much existing awards data for us to do it manually as a staff.

That doesn't mean that we are necessarily going to move them to Lists. It's just that we can't even begin to contemplate it until we have the necessary data to do so. Then again we may very well decide that these sorts of things are different enough from Lists as to make them closer to Awards and keep them. In my opinion, some of them certainly should be moved to Lists. And it's something we've talked about making a tool to do. We'll see once they are categorized through this process.

So I think I'd add a final category that is "List" that is meant to categorize the award as not being an Award, but a List.

My opinion:
Award
Honors, Accolades, Distinctions
List (should not be an Award, these are the original Recommended Reading items 4-6)

>43 conceptDawg: Those 3 sound good to me, and it seem straightforward to define what goes where.

Will it be similar to series interface, all in one place with those categories picked and switched if necessary right there?

>43 conceptDawg:

My opinion:
Award
Honors, Accolades, Distinctions
List (should not be an Award, these are the original Recommended Reading items 4-6)

If you think you can pull it off, great. Perhaps should have a separate name for this type of Lists as opposed to user lists of various types.

My point was not that you can't write code to move the data around; of course you can! I just think that deciding what is an Award, what is an Accolade, and what is a non-frumious bandedsnatch is going to represent a monster problem, and I think any quick solution is going to make a lot of mistakes.

>45 waltzmn: Why do you think it's a monster problem? 4-6 from Tim's original post seem easy enough to differentiate from 1-3. 1 would be Awards from that list, 2 and 3 Honors and 4-6 Lists. I thought it's very straightforward when I saw it, it's just a matter of wording those properly somewhere on new awards page so that everyone who goes there can see what each category should contain. And if it works like series, it will be just a few clicks to change the category if it is wrong.

>46 SandraArdnas: Why do you think it's a monster problem.

Artificial example because I don't know if this precise example exists:

"Newberry Award Honors List 2002"

Which does it go in? How do you code it?

If your code is something like

If (AwardNameField contains "Award")
Then
PlaceInAward()
Else
PlaceInList();

then it becomes an award. But if your code is

If (AwardNameField contains "List")
Then
PlaceInList()
Else
PlaceInAward();

then it's a list.

Conceptually, the distinction is easy. But writing code to reliably file... what, hundreds of thousands (millions?) of different field names into two different categories? Either the code has to be really complex or we accept an extremely high error rate. Or else someone has to look at all the various types of items and decide which bucket to place them in.

Or train an AI, I suppose. But that's not easy either.

>47 waltzmn: I don't think that Tim or really anyone besides you is thinking of having software determine the type. I believe the idea is to have a field on each "award" that allows a user to select the type
And I don't see why we couldn't have a button that would let any user transfer the data in an award-thats-really-a-list to a List and delete the award

>47 waltzmn: That would be in the awards section because it's part of the Newberry Award. But much of the awards clean up will need to be done manually. As it always has.

>48 jjwilson61: I don't think that Tim or really anyone besides you is thinking of having software determine the type. I believe the idea is to have a field on each "award" that allows a user to select the type

>49 gilroy: But much of the awards clean up will need to be done manually. As it always has.

Then we're in agreement as to what will end up being the mechanism. :-) But then all the old data will be in a state of limbo. That means we want to make it as easy and as obvious as possible how to fix it.

Further re:

>49 gilroy: That would be in the awards section because it's part of the Newberry Award.

How do you know? I don't mean that to be hostile; I mean that taking an anecdotal example or two doesn't give you much ability to generalize. How do you know if, instead of the "Newberry Award," it were the "Lewis Carroll Honour" or the "Princeps Tænia"? It's hard to make an algorithm of this, and the more obscure the item, the harder it gets.

>50 waltzmn: Admittedly I'm assuming that the new Awards module will work similar to the Series module (which also required a ton of manual clean up and still does) so I'm making guesses.

Newberry Award Honors List 2002

All things Newberry Award should lump together, with groupings and such beneath the main heading of Newberry Award. As such, it would come as an award, as that's what the name says. (I'm also trying to make the simplistic assumption that anything named "Award" or "Prize" would be under the Award category for ease of explanation.)

>51 gilroy: All things Newberry Award should lump together, with groupings and such beneath the main heading of Newberry Award. As such, it would come as an award, as that's what the name says. (I'm also trying to make the simplistic assumption that anything named "Award" or "Prize" would be under the Award category for ease of explanation.)

I think you're missing the point of my question about how you know. You can say that anything with the word "Award" in it is an award (though I could probably come up with a pathological case where that would get you in trouble), but the question I'm really asking is how you look at some title for a thing and decide if it's an award or something else. Since many things will not have a word like "award" in the title, you need something more subtle. If you just say that everything with "award" or "prize" in the title is an award, and everything else isn't, then you don't gain anything by separating the two categories. You just sort everything them so that things with "award" in the title is at the top of the list, and the others are below, and people can read the list and see what they want.

If you could actually design a working algorithm that could actually do this, as opposed to a few rules of thumb that work on the easy cases but don't work on the hard ones... you might just be able to put ChatGPT out of business, because you'd have a real artificial intelligence. :-)

>47 waltzmn:

"Newberry Award Honors List 2002"

Not to be pedantic, but it's the Newbery Award (one "r"). Which matters, because the Newberry Library in Chicago (two "r"s) also gives awards (though to people, not books).

>51 gilroy:

All things Newberry Award should lump together,

Oh, really? There are Newbery (one "r") Awards and Newbery (one "r") Honors, and the "Newberry Library (two "r"s) Awards". They are all different things. So, no, they should not "lump together".

One reason we can't move this to lists: The new awards system is adapted for the data people attack to awards. So, for example, each work can have:

*A date
*A stage (e.g., Winner, Long list, Finalist, etc.)
*A category (e.g., Fiction, Nonfiction, etc.)
*An ordering number

Lists really only have the ordering part. So if we have a list that's divided into stages or categories, or which have any dates at all, we'd have to throw that information out. Ditto links, images, descriptions in various languages, alternate names, relationships between awards, etc.

Similarly, awards are complex enough to need a power-edit feature. You need to be able to change many awards at once. The new feature has this. Lists does not.

>58 davidgn: If you could actually design a working algorithm that could actually do this

Lucy has written a good algorithm to extract date, stage, category and ordering number, but she hasn't combined different awards. That's going to have to be done by staff and members. Fortunately, there's a combination feature, which allows you to combine and add data—for example, to combine the Booker Short List into the Booker award generally, adding "Shortlist" on each entry, etc.

>43 conceptDawg:

I am definitely against moving many to lists. Lists are much simpler concept, and can't handle much of the data here. See above.

So I think I'd add a final category that is "List" that is meant to categorize the award as not being an Award, but a List.

The type can perhaps have the word "list" in it somehow, but it needs not to be "List" because we don't want confusion.

>36 Taliesien: I find it fascinating that you are unable/unwilling to articulate a reason you won't do it though.

I've done so a number of times, but the above is important. Lists are designed for lists, with no further organization. The interface is really best at lists made by many members, and single-member lists sit somewhat awkwardly in it. Members can't just change a list; they have to either make it entirely, or contribute to it in a way that is merely additive to the original effort, not collaborative.

Indeed, because the system is structured around votes, members can really make a hash of any attempt to create a single, collaborative repository of list information. They can add a work or add votes to an existing work, but they can't reorganize, delete, edit, etc. The lack of true collaboration is why lists have no "helpers" section. Members do not help to get a list into shape; they aren't collaborating except insofar as an election collaborates to elect a candidate.

Ugh. Not my day. Recovering from surgery, and clearing my schedule didn't work so well (I just dozed off).

I wish I were still more steeped in this stuff.
Before I come back with more, the first cases off the top of my head.

With regards to awards and >40 moonflowerdragon: "only one" --
Yeah, "only one" is not going to survive contact with reality.
How about gold, silver, and bronze in multiple categories?
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Florida+Book+Award

The big prize, and then prizes in different categories.
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Prix+de+La+Nuit+du+Livre

Split awards are also quite common in the scheme of things. As well as special mentions and other "couldn't leave it out" maneuvers, sometimes one-off.

ETA:
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Maskew+Miller+Longman+Literature+Award
Winners and runners-up, plus some awards for short stories have multiple awards to multiple authors in a given volume.
---------

The awards out of the Angouleme comics festival.
https://www.librarything.com/search.php?search=angouleme&searchtype=8&so...
Any way of associating them to each other under the same umbrella, apart from "see also" links in the description (which might be a project)?
Also noteworthy that the different awards are awarded under different auspices and criteria.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angoul%C3%AAme_International_Comics_Festival
They've all got "Angouleme" in the name (or have been made to have it) but there are a lot of other awards that don't have an easy mechanism to associate them without butchering the name.

Another example is the awards given by the SGDL
https://www.librarything.com/search.php?search=sgdl&searchtype=8&sortcho...
(I've added "de la SGDL" to all of them as the only reasonable way to keep them commonly searchable, but it's an interpolation, and people have rightly complained about that).

---------------

With respect to the "attached" data fields, here are some good test cases:
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Bank+Street+CBC+Best+Children%27s+Book+of...
(age range, category, subcategory, some selections are starred)

The "In The Margins" list, top 10 list, and awards.
https://www.librarything.com/search.php?search=in+the+margins&searchtype=8&a...
These are "nesting," but are each assigned in their own right. Could be shoehorned into a long list/shortlist/(multiple) award regime, but that's not exactly right on procedural grounds, as far as I can tell.
The only reason these are structured as they are -- fully recursively broken out -- is down to their conciseness. Could equally break out the starred subset from Bank Street CBC's list (e.g. "Bank Street CBC Best Children's Book of the Year, Starred Selection")

There's also the question of awards that go to the author versus the illustrator versus the translator into a particular language versus the physical book designer.
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/IBBY+Honour+Book
(has examples of all but the designer)
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/New+Mexico-Arizona+Book+Awards
(gets as specific as awards for cover design in specific size categories. Also has many examples of books winning in multiple categories, which is another wrinkle that will recur frequently).
Oh, and it also has a finalist list.
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/New+Mexico-Arizona+Book+Awards+Finalist

Comments welcome. I'll be back with more later tonight. (I hope.)

ETA:
Another point: any plans on making the awards browseable, and/or filterable/sortable, and/or taggable? (On criteria like languages, geographical scope, genre or subjectscope, etc.) Because there's so much there, but it's not very discoverable unless you already know what you're looking for, or you start surfing overlapping awards by serendipity.
Maybe I'm going to have to move to Europe (for the EU IP regime) and build my own database...

I’m not going to get myself very involved in this discussion other than to say that I don’t think example 6 in Tim’s list (bestseller lists, etc.) should be lumped in with awards and honours (or whatever they end up being called. It’s just not.

I do wonder what will happen to awards that are given to authors for their entire body of work rather than a specific work. As far as I can tell, the discussion is completely focused on awards and honours given to specific, individual works. But there are plenty of awards (ahem, the Nobel Prize in Literature) that are given to authors without singling out any particular work. Will these awards also get a makeover?

>57 PawsforThought: Right now they are on the author CK, not the work CK. Good question. (ETA: FWIW, that field is also locked.)
There are also intermediate cases where an author is given an award with special reference to one or more works. I've usually entered those in the work CK for each of the mentioned works, but that's a judgment call.

I like grouping 1-2 as awards.
I would have 3 as its own category. Starred or noted reviews. I often find this the most useful thing as awards and lists are sometimes (not always) just popularity contests but a kirkus or publishers weekly starred review makes me take a closer look. And I wouldn't want it lumped in with either awards or other types of lists as in 4-6, for which I'm fine with either honor or distinction.

>52 waltzmn: I think you're severely overthinking something that doesn't need to be.

>54 lilithcat: I didn't say Newbery would lump with Newberry, now did I? I just said all things Newberry. I expect spelling differences to remain separate until human intervention determines their similarities and differences.

>59 tottman: Did you know authors have to pay for Kirkus reviews? I didn't until I went looking. Haven't checked if it's the same for PW.

Would this make it possible to merge awards that have changed names through the years?

>61 FAMeulstee: Or at least associate them somehow without inputting custom HTML into the description that invariably breaks?

>61 FAMeulstee: Would this make it possible to merge awards that have changed names through the years?

Yes. The older names can be preserved as "historical names," with dates.

>57 PawsforThought:

I do wonder what will happen to awards that are given to authors for their entire body of work rather than a specific work.

Presumably they would continue to be on the Author page.

I'm really just not up to breaking out the examples above into numbers just now. But a useful set of cases to consider is the In The Margins examples.

A1. https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/In+the+Margins+Official+List
I'd say List (or we could try "Distinguished List"?)

A2. https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/In+the+Margins+Official+List+-+Top+Ten
Probably also list?

A3. https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/In+the+Margins+Social+Justice%252FAdvocac...
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/In+the+Margins+Social+Justice%252FAdvocac...
Award

A4. https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/In+the+Margins+Award
Award

I think (Distinguished) list / honor / award is a useful distinction, but the boundaries between are going to get really fuzzy.

A5. https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/A+Horn+Book+Fanfare+Best+Book
Here's an old classic. So is this a list, or an honor? I mean, I've got too much respect for that designation to place it on par with, say, something that winds up on this list:
A6. https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/NCTE+Adventuring+with+Books%3A+A+Booklist...

But if that's an honor, then what's this?

A7. https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Boston+Globe%E2%80%93Horn+Book+Award
OK, an award. Great. One winner each category. But honors are also included into it.

Should those be broken out into a separate honor list (such as this abominably named stub list)?
A8. https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Boston+Globe-Horn+Book+Honor+Award
So we'll rename that, and call that an honor, and all is right in the world?

All right, but then what about the Florida Book Award?
A9. https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Florida+Book+Award
So, we keep calling it an award, and keep the medals integrated, as it stands? That's what i'd favor.

OK, but how about another case.
A10. https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Prix+des+libraires+du+Qu%C3%A9bec
Littered with "special mentions"
Still a "prize" under the tripartite classification? Keep it all together or split?

Things get tricky quickly. I'm going back to bed.

>65 davidgn: I want to believe that part of this new interface is to get all things with like titles together.

So your Horn Book Award and Horn Book Honor Award could go into a single title, with subgroups beneath.
The Florida Book Award wouldn't need to change.
The Prix des libraries du Quebec would remain as a single unit.

I want to believe this will allow all the multiple languages to merge into a single award line, instead of separate.
I want to believe this will allow Long lists, Short Lists, and the actual award to all be on the same page.

Am I right? No clue. But that would be my hope.

>64 lilithcat: That’s not really what I was wondering. Since the work-specific awards are getting a makeover, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to wonder if the same (or same kind) of makeover will be applied to the author awards.

My main complain about LT Awards and Honors is I can never find them on the site when I want to look one up (same for Lists BTW). So whatever you decide to do, maybe clarify how one finds Awards, Honors, Distinctions, Lists if one is looking for them. I seem to have to hunt and stumble every time I want to check which of my current pile of TBR books might have received one.

Try searching LT for "Awards" and see if anything remotely helpful guides you to the best place to find them on the site.

The WIKI says they're entered as part of Common Knowledge, but going to CK just lets you search within the Awards and Honors field.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious because I'm not on LT as much as I used to be, but it seems lately I can never find what I'm looking for here, end up looking elsewhere instead, and only using LT for my own catalog.

Sorry if I sound crabby . . . I'm getting to the age where "software improvements" just mean "I no longer can figure this out" . . . this morning that included the program I use for my email being totally "new and improved" and temporarily unusable. . . . and yes, I know, the rest of the world no longer uses email. :)

>53 lilithcat: Not to be pedantic, but it's the Newbery Award (one "r"). Which matters, because the Newberry Library in Chicago (two "r"s) also gives awards (though to people, not books).

Since I'm told I'm over-thinking this (whereas I would say you're all under-thinking it :-), I won't argue any more over mechanisms -- but you are proving my point. If one is classifying these things, exact syntax matters. Since I was inventing an award/list/whosis, I'm allowed to call it what I want. :-) And a system that was lumping them would miss the combination, because it's misspelled.

I will confess to not having known the spelling, if it matters, but the fact that I could mis-spell it just demonstrates why an automatic system is going to have trouble.

>68 LucindaLibri: Awards are found by searching for their name. In the search box in the upper right hand corner, type in what you seek. Then when the search page comes up, in the left hand column, click on Common Knowledge -- Awards. If the work doesn't have an award added to its common knowledge already, you won't be able to find if it won one on LT. You have to dig elsewhere.

I'm not sure what you are seeking outside of that?

So some thoughts.

1) Shortlists/finalists - do they get combined as part of the award. Maybe handled better. So we have Hugo Awards with different years and different categories and winner and finalists?

2) How about things like The Mechanical Peach Short Story Contest? A blind-judged (by a jury) competition with a winner?

3) Awards that can contain people and works in the same category?

4) Works that win (or are shortlisted) in multiple categories for the same award, in the same year (or even multiple years)? The old awards system didn't handle those well (only displaying one of the entries).

5) Awards for series?

6) Awards only for certain editions of a work (where that work is combined with other others which do are not applicable to the award). Audie Awards for example? Or awards for translation. Yeah I know that would open up the editions / expressions can of worms - sorry, not sorry.

Me again with another thougt

Presumably this will also be for awards/honours to people. So stuff like a Nobel Pize (or Fields Medal or Turing Award etc). We currently also have knighthoods and chivalric orders and military honours listed in the Author award CK. Will these be handled well? How about Honorary Doctorates etc - looking at how they are entered currently we have "Honorary Doctorate, University of Bath (2003)"?

I am also wondering what will happen with 1) Shortlists/finalists - do they get combined as part of the award. Maybe handled better. So we have Hugo Awards with different years and different categories and winner and finalists? in particular. I would much prefer that LongList, Short List and Finalist's / Winners all remain in the awards section.

>71 andyl: >73 vancouverdeb:
Yes it sounds like we'd combine those, under the name of the award, then organise/filter/view them on the one page, going by >55 timspalding: which mentions year, stage, category.

>71 andyl:
>Awards only for certain editions of a work

Cover art gets into this too, when the work may have many different covers but one wins an award. A 'some editions' checkbox or similar (like in the work page, other authors) could be a basic answer.

>65 davidgn:

Useful case studies. Thanks for listing them!

>75 Petroglyph: Yeah. I hope I've pointed out where the tripartite distinction many people seem to favor will run into trouble. I'll have to put some thought into whether a bipartite division such as Tim seems to favor would be less problematic. But on the face of it, For examples of >65 davidgn:, A-everything is an award, except A6 is a distinction/"distinguished list(ing)")? That sounds...almost doable. :-)

>76 davidgn: I really hope that not all but A6 will be awards because we might as well not make any distinctions at all than. The entire reason I asked for this is to make Awards usable in catalogue, meaning it won't have dozens of entries for any remotely popular book.

Here's the system we're adopting—up on the Wiki so we can be ready to release Monday or Tuesday.

https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/HelpThing:Awards_and_Honors

The system does combine an awards "stages" together—longlist, shortlist, etc. The list can be viewed all together, or by one of its stages. You can also view categories. So, for example, you can look at the Pulitzer, or only the Biography category of the Pulitzer. You can also look by date—only the 2023 winners, the 2023 longlist, the 2023 biographies, etc.

Works can appear on the same list twice, which is useful particularly if there's some combination of stage, category and date that is complex. So, for example, a work can have been on the longlist for one category, but made it all the way to winning in another category.

The initial system will only apply to works, not to authors or series. It will not have a fully fleshed-out system for specifying when a work appears not overall, but for some aspect (e.g., an essay in a work, or for the illustrator, but not everyone). But each work in an award can have a note.

There's also an organization layer, so you can see all the awards given out by the ALA, or indeed by sub-organizations, like YALSA, which is then marked as a sub-organization of ALA, etc.

Needless to say, much of the work organizing will have to be done by members. But we've done about a week's worth of it ourselves, with staff working part time, but putting in perhaps 40 hours combined.

I'd like to answer more of the questions and concerns here, but it's Saturday and I'm not able to work very much today.

>78 timspalding: Looks good to me as categories.

Waiting until new system is implemented to see how it all works in practice regarding grouping, designating winners, runner ups and all the other ways to organize entries within, but it's certain to be an improvement over the clunky way we did it in old system within CK, so excited to see

>78 timspalding: Sounds good to me. The Recommended Reading Lists versus Distinctions, er, distinction is not one I initially would have made, but it does accomplish a fair bit of ringfencing of the sorts of lists that seem to irk people the most.
So as written, I guess A6 would be a distinction?
Also:
"Recommended Reading Lists
Criteria: These are one-off or lists..."
(guessing you meant to write "one-off lists?" Or was there another thought there?)

Enjoy the weekend.

Well, I still don’t like the bestseller list being lumped into this, but I guess I can always ignore it. If there was a way for me to actually hide that section, even better.

I would really like an option to display only "awards" in my library, not the "honors/distinctions", and "best of lists" categories. I would like to see what in my library has won a Pulitzer, Newbery, etc., but am not really that interested in lumping that in with the other two categories. I get that they are already there. I would just like to request a feature in the awards section of charts and graphs that would display a particular category of awards.

>82 al.vick: Hear, hear!

>82 al.vick: That is why different categories are being discussed. Each should be available as separate column in catalogue eventually.

>84 SandraArdnas: In fact, you'll see them now. ;)

Looks like there are lists mixed into all of them if you ask me... 1000 books to read before you die is a top award and honor? It's a shorter list of "awards" though. I do agree with most on that top list belong there though.

>86 al.vick: We now have the ability to add the distinction within the Award Settings. As more of the data is populated and cleaned up with the new capabilities we'll be able to filter them better.

And there are now separate catalog columns available so that if you only want to see actual Awards then you can.

when I pick top awards and honors, and try to go to page 2, it just loads page 1 again.

don't mean to complain too much. The amount of work you have done is great, and it is definitely an improvement. I like the individual award pages, and that you can pick a year or a type. Very nice. So kudos!

>85 conceptDawg: Does this mean it's out and we can start editing now?

>88 al.vick: I assume you mean on this page: https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/awards; fixing

Let's hold back on commenting about bugs, etc. here. We are still rolling out parts of the code.
We're going to have a full Talk post announcing the feature in the next hour or so and bugs/comments should go there to keep everything centralized.

Can we have a save button at the top of the Edit > Settings page? Will post on the dedicated thread went it comes out.

Whee! This is gonna be a lot of fun.

>92 conceptDawg:

Wow - I just power-edited British Fantasy Award to add the stage Winner, and then combined British Fantasy Award Nominee (> 700 works) into the main award with the stage Nominee. It all worked as I expected.

I do have a few things I am sitting on until the official thread - but so far it looks good.

Official thread coming soon-ish. It was unfortunately not pre-written.

Any way to undo an award combination? Found one that would have been more appropriately done as a predecessor/successor. ETA: Or maybe not. Anyhow, guess it can wait till the official thread.

Here's the announcement topic:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/353768