Default for author name input

Books Book Connect
1

We’ve used Book Connect for three years for our retirement community library. I am currently the administrator. At some point I noticed that looking up books by author was displaying more than one entry after the search was complete. If we are checking to see if we already have a title, this requires us to drill down into more than one record. (Yes, I know I could look it up by title, but sometimes that is not foolproof.)
What I get is more than one entry:
James, Patterson (2) – FYI - These are the most recently scanned-in / newest titles
Patterson, James (26)
Patterson, James (4)

In order to fix this, I have to go into the book records for the newly added books and edit the author names so that both Author and Sort Name are:
Patterson, James
What I find is that if these two fields are not identical, I end up with multiple author entries.
So, here’s my question:
Is there anyway for me to override this so that newly scanned books match previously scanned books, which all used to be listed with Author and Sort name as LastName, FirstName?
Thanks!

2

Sometimes different spellings of the same author can be downloaded from our Core book database. In that case, a bit of list management is needed to fix this. Here’s what to do:

  1. Click on the menu icon top left.
  2. Click “Manage Pick Lists”
  3. Select “Author” from the dropdown at the top.
  4. Perform a small search with a word that you know is in both the artists. Or tap “return” if you don’t want to search.
  5. Check the box in front of the authors you wish to merge.
  6. Click the little blue MERGE icon on the right of the author you want them to be merged to.

That should do the trick to have them in one author folder again. The mapping is not remembered, so you may have to do this again in the future if another version spelling of that author is downloaded.

Hope that helps a bit!