Searching for duplicate books in my library

Is there a way to do a search that returns duplicate books (title but not necessarily isbn) in my librarything catalog? I'm cleaning up and organizing both my real library and my LT library and have discovered I had some books in twice and would like to quickly see if there are more duplicates.

TY!

From your Home tab, you will find a Stats/Memes tab at the top, just below the brown color band.

Library statistics is the first entry and "See work multiples" is in small print there.

Is this what you want?
Go to Stats/Memes, at the bottom on the left:
Click on
"Work duplicates"

www.librarything.com/profile/MEMBERNAME/stats/workdups
For future reference, found under stats/memes, 2nd to last item.

ETA
Too slow! xP

Thanks!

That was interesting. I just checked for duplicates in my library and I know I have dups of Harry Potter but I found some other ones. I am in the process of organizing all my books and checking to see that I have them entered into LT. I have found some doubles and will be donating them to libraries if they want them.

You can also find dupes if you sort by how many members have the work, because they may be uncombined, 'straglers' so won't show up in your work duplicates.

When making our initial catalog, it was interesting to see the true duplicates we had acquired. Of course for some books we intentionally have multiple editions because they are from different publishers and contain different illustrations. An example of this is more than two dozen copies of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne.

James

In my first search I found three separate members with the same book. Two were the only members listed and the third had 94 members. Is there a nice clean way of combining them? It seems statistics would be way off when this happens.

>9 whybehave2002: Yes, books can be combined into works. What you see when you click on the title of a book in your catalog is actually a work page which combines the information from the books its composed of. You can ask how to combine or request that others do the combination in the Combiners! group at https://www.librarything.com/groups/combiners.

>9 whybehave2002: I've combined some of your singletons, but there are a lot more.

>4 .Monkey.:

Great! Thanks

Now that I can see which books are duplicate works, I am struggling to figure out which one is the "right" one so that I can weed out the duplicates. For instance, I only have one copy of The Iron Heel, and have only read one copy. But I have four copies in my library. I would like to consolidate and have all my tags, reviews, etc., on the copy with the right ISBN and the right cover, but it's harder to figure out which one that is than I expected. Any tips?

Here's what I would do:

Make sure you have a catalog view that includes ISBN, cover, tags, review, and anything else you may want to merge.

Search your library for the title in question. I can't use "The Iron Heel" as an example since it looks like you've already dealt with that; there's only one copy now. But you have three of The Trial, so let's use that:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/greeniezona&deepsearch=trial%2C+kafka

Choose the one that has the "correct" cover and ISBN, and copy over tags, reviews, etc. from the other copies.

Now, if it's hard for you to figure out which one has the "correct" cover, that's not really something LT can help with.

Right, it wasn't so much that I couldn't figure out which one had the correct cover, as that in the case of The Iron Heel (which, you're right, I figured out a way to fix that one since posting about it), I had four copies, one of which had the right cover pictured, but it wasn't the one that had the ISBN that matched the copy I had in my hand. At first when I tried to switch cover images, it wanted me to switch books as well, but it looks like I figured out hot to fix that part.

Thanks for the tips, lorax. I'm still figuring out all the ways to do power searching in LibraryThing.

And thanks, Collectorator! I'm hoping this attempt at LibraryThing doesn't flame out like I have in the past.

9/4/2021: Unless I'm mistaken, the "Stats/Memes" tab is no longer available (or maybe I just can't find it) but in "Charts & Graphs - Odd and Ends" there is "Work Duplicates" - this is not quite the view I was searching for (just looking for books I entered more than once, not works of which I have more than one copy). But still helpful.

>17 RWAbington: just looking for books I entered more than once, not works of which I have more than one copy

I don't understand how LibraryThing could possibly tell the difference between those two.

>17 RWAbington: The "charts and graphs" is the old "stats and memes" in a new form.

"Work duplicates" does indeed identify works for which you have more than one entry in your library. This applies both to cases where you intentionally have multiple editions of the same work as well as to any books you might have erroneously entered more than once.

LT does have an option to fill in "number of copies" when you enter a book (i.e., one entry recorded as having x copies). This is most useful for cases where you have more than one identical copy of a work (same edition/isbn/cover art etc.). I haven't used this feature, so I don't know whether LT takes it into account on the statistics pages. I suspect it isn't included in the "work duplicates" list.

>19 spiphany: Unfortunately, I don't think LT uses the "Number of copies" field at all, not in calculating your number of books, not in calculating duplicates, etc. It's just a field you can fill in but never see unless you open up the book details for a particular book.

>20 anglemark: That's my impression, too, but I wanted to mention the feature because the poster referred to works they have more than one copy of and this is one way that users might choose to record that information in LT.

>18 anglemark: Correct - and I wouldn't expect it to do so. The work duplicates list is useful for both purposes!

I remember there being two values reported by LT, duplicate which was just based on ISBN and work duplicate which found books joined to the same work.

>2 2wonderY: did this go away because I am currently trying to clean up my list and I can't find Stats/memes.

>24 Enid007: It's Charts and Graphs now and with much more info and graphs.