LibraryThing needs author authority records

err, at least I think it does, assuming I actually know what an author authority record is

What I imagine it is, based on my vague understanding of librarianship and catalogues, is a unique record for each distinct author.

Right now, LibraryThing thinks any author with the same name is the same person.
So it thinks one Chris Anderson has written not just The Long Tail but also

Books by Chris Anderson (combine/separate works)

• The Long Tail : Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less o… 64 copies, 2 reviews
• Genealogist's guide to discovering your Germanic ancestors :… 6 copies
• A forest of voices : conversations in ecology 4 copies
• Bodies of Evidence : The Shocking True Story of America's Mo… 2 copies
• Style As Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction 1 copies
• Teaching as Believing: Faith in the University (Studies in R… 1 copies
• Open Questions: Readings for Critical Thinking and Writing 1 copies
• The Billy Boy: The Life and Death of LVF Leader Billy Wright… 1 copies

I'm guessing these are actually multiple Chris Andersons.

See the LibraryThing group posting Question re separating authors (but not books)

So you see, I'm not actually anti-catalogue, or anti-cataloguing, I'm just anti-OPAC.
The problem is data audience.
There are two big splits I see: librarian / general user and human-readable / machine-readable.

The big problem has been, I think, that the OPAC tried to take librarian, human-readable data,
and use it both for general users and for computer manipulation.

So anyway, I don't actually know what an author authority record is, but it sounds like what LibraryThing needs.  In computer terms, we would just assign a unique ID to every unique author, which is in fact exactly what they're doing for scientific papers in the Dutch Digital Author Identification project.

I think it's unfortunate that librarians don't seem to be sharing their expertise in correctly grouping and separating books and authors, an area which they mastered long ago.

To your keyboards, librarians!

PS Once you've fixed authors, here's another problem: I have books that are collections of other books, e.g. the SF book club book "Sanctuary" contains the first three Thieves World books bound together.  Make that work properly so I show up as owning both the container book, and the individual books that it contains.