importing records from goodreads

over the last year or so, i've developed a hands-on method of duplicating goodreads records with LT... most of the records join LT without issue, but with every attempt, there are sometimes more than a few that do not.

as an example, just now i created a CSV with 231 new records. a large portion did not have an ISBN, but i asked for those to be added anyway. of the 231 originals, 29 either were not added or the YOUR BOOKS counter is wrong. i can find no audit trail, no error message, no reason for the discrepancy. because i don't know which records were not added, i cannot say if there's a pattern. if i had to guess, 90% success is approximately correct for each import, though the number does fluctuate up and down...

is someone available to help understand what might be going on?

ps: is there a way to search topics so a duplicate question/request does not waste anyone's time? :)

thanks...

On the site search page various options are available in the left hand menu. Just enter your search in the site search box, and switch fron work to whatever you need once the first result comes up.

Some things to ask:

What sources are you choosing when you upload your file? Or are you using the Goodreads transfer protocol?
Can you give us the date of the upload file for the admin to research what went wrong? And maybe list a book or two that went through and one or two that didn't?

How long did you wait between upload and check? The cache system has been needing time to function lately, so anything less than 6 hours may repair itself.

>3 gilroy: hello, gilroy
what sources? the defaults, which if i remember correctly include amazon and LoC...

date of upload was yesterday for the most recent (2024-1110). timestamp would have been somewhere around 2100 to 2200 PST. as for titles, i only just now noticed "failed" volumes in the import/export lookup queue. the first two listed have no correlation with anything i uploaded:
ISBN: 0056777175 failed
ISBN: 0060538031 failed

the next, did:
ISBN: 047363645X failed
-- Murder for a Song: An Enchanting Witchy Mystery (Musical Mayhem Book 1) K.M. Jackways

to the best of my recollection, the lookup queue was not visible last night, at least not during the 30-60 minutes after import...

how long did i wait: 30 minutes, give or take. fwiw, the YOUR BOOKS counter hasn't changed in 24 hours, so the counter is consistent...

oh. the lookup queue says 44 failures were seen. i only know of 29, so where the other 15 come from, i have no idea...

i appreciate the help. every import i've done in the past year has had these issues, but i'm only know understanding a need to know what's actually happening.

thank you...

>2 MarthaJeanne: hello, marthaJeanne

the only site search box i see is the one that says "search librarything", which does a fine job of searching LT for book names and authors. am i supposed to use that for help search? i don't see anything elsewhere that seems helpful for bug topics or the contents of bug reports.

thank you for your help :)

>5 travelgirl-fics: Yes. After you search in this textbox, you can scroll down the page to find the 'Social' header on the left, and click on 'groups,' 'talk,' 'members,' or 'wiki,' to find results from those categories.

>1 travelgirl-fics: >4 travelgirl-fics: Thanks for your report and your details! I'm taking a dive into your imports now:

First, it looks like you haven't cleared your failed imports queue since your import run on May 5, which tallies up the extra 14 fails you're seeing. The two ISBNs you didn't recognize were the two failed records from your May 5 import.

Looking at your latest import, now, from yesterday (around 1am EST on our end, but late on 11/10 PST): it looks like you chose Amazon.com books, ACAWeb (Appalachian College Association - KY, NC, TN, VA, WV) (Bristol, TN), and then the Library of Congress (Washington, DC) as your 3 data sources. The 29 failed records were noted as not found in those sources, although I'm checking some of these and that's not 100% true.

Examples
1. ISBN 1956029044 is found in Amazon.com books on the "Add books" page
2. Same as above with ISBN 1738419118...

I'm going to test importing the failed records on one of my test accounts (kristi_test_02) and see if I can reproduce the issues. Will report back.

A question for you: Have you considered using our actual Goodreads import at https://www.librarything.com/more/import/goodreads ? I wonder if you'd have better luck this way.

Okay, I ran the import on the failed records, using the same set of sources, and I was able to get some imported: see https://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?tag=Nov+12+2024&view=kristi_test_02

I still saw 10 failed ISBNs, which again isn't true. I found 9 of the 10 failed ISBNs on Amazon.com books via the "Add books" page:
1. 1738419118
2. 1956029117
3. 196018900X
4. 199133107X
5. 1963345029
6. 1950188345
7. 1939872197
8. 1624301444
9. 9798989369317 (I'm pretty sure this failed the first time I searched it, but it worked the 2nd time.)

The only ISBN I didn't find from the chosen sources listed at >7 kristilabrie: was 9798986047003 ... it seems like there's some sort of intermittent failing of Amazon.com books, but I'll need to see if ccatalfo can poke around a bit when he has time. Thanks for your patience.

In the meantime, you might want to try re-importing those failed ISBNs to see if they work the 2nd time around. And, possibly change your non-Amazon sources if you think it will help. (You could also try selecting Amazon.com all media instead of Amazon.com books in case that helps!)

>7 kristilabrie: "... using our actual goodreads import ..."

i believe i tried it the first couple of times earlier this year, and my success rate was non-optimal :) the method i've used works about 90% of the time, which is far better than what i remember for the goodreads import code chain.

my methodology is hands-on, but it works, and only takes a few minutes of editing the goodreads csv before importing through UNIVERSAL IMPORT...

having said that, do you have specific instructions for beating those odds? i'm guessing the goodreads file needs to be edited to remove all books already imported, but i'd love to be surprised :)

>8 kristilabrie: "... try re-importing ..."

would it be better to simply attempt a re-import of the entire CSV, or do i really need to keep track of which ISBNs have failed, then edit to keep those around?

oh, and i'm tempted to use the goodreads import if you think there's no likelihood of duplicating hundreds of already-imported books.

thanks...

FYI -- i just re-imported the latest goodreads csv through the goodreads option, managed to import another 24. not sure which ones are still missing, but i suppose i could give it another try later today and see what the queue says... easier finding fails with 5 items than 29 :)

>12 travelgirl-fics: Sorry, that was me testing a quick upload on your account (to see how we assessed your import file)!

>9 travelgirl-fics: As you can probably tell, our imports need a general cleanup (it's something we're working on and hope to have implemented in the near future), so whatever method you're finding works best for you is probably the one to keep! Although it looks like the GR import did give you some success, so there's that. You can also sync your duplicate records with the GR import, so you can bring in some new data as needed. Food for thought.

>10 travelgirl-fics: If you get into a habit of mass-tagging your imports (say, with the date, such as "Nov 12 2024"), this will let you quickly filter your catalog to your imports. This way, if you want to redo an import, you can easily do this and then delete older imports as needed. Alternatively, if you want to keep an import but delete the custom tag, you can do that from your Tags page: https://www.librarything.com/tags/MEMBERNAME . I hope this helps.

>11 travelgirl-fics: Great! I took a look at your books added this month: https://www.librarything.com/catalog/travelgirl-fics?entrydate=2024-11&colle..., and I'm actually finding 16 duplicates from your 11/12 import, although they appear to have more complete data tied to them. (I'm not sure why the system couldn't recognize them as duplicates during the import process... that would take some extensive digging.) What I would do is find the duplicate titles from 11/11 and remove those from your catalog. You can do this by exploring your work duplicates (from Charts & Graphs > Odds and Ends), or by sorting your November cataloged books (linked above) and sorting by the Work ID or Title.

I found 16 books added on 11/12 that were unique (not duplicates), so that's good! 13 titles were not found during the import, and didn't make it to your catalog.

I'm happy to give you more specific information on those titles (unique, duplicate, not added), just let me know.