Come chat with your friendly Natively Librarians!
Say hi, ask a question or discuss general issues you are having with the catalog.
If you have an issue with a particular item, it’s better to use the “Something not right? Let us know!” button on our pages.
Our Librarians: @Biblio @eefara @HopeWaterfall @mitrac @shitsurei @gillianfaith @monace @樺石
Guidance on - How do I submit feedback/an issue report?
Welcome and congrats everyone!
I’d just like to give a huge shout out to you all - You’ve worked tirelessly and have gone through literally years of backlog to fix things all up for the book data.
I can’t express how amazing it’s been! Thank you all! You’ve made a massive impact on the Natively community 
An equal thank you to you, brandon, for giving us good tools for our job. 
I have to agree with eefara: the general population doesn’t see how much work goes on in the back, but you have done tremendous work getting us the tools we need. 
Well it’s much easier when you all are excited to use the tools! 
Thank you all for your hard work! 
Thanks to the librarians for all the great work they are doing.
When the Spanish books pull through their title from Amazon, they can pull some extra junk as well - often something in brackets at the end of the title. Every time you clean up a book title it makes me happy! 
If you come across anymore, feel free to put a note in the book’s feedback.
Is the standard for authors to have a space between their first and last name or no?
I was looking up the author 若杉公徳 and Detroit Metal City has a space in the author name but the other two works on here have no space. So they don’t all come up in the same search.
We will address this in bulk on the devs side, hopefully soon! 
Sweet
Thanks 
That’s nice feedback, thanks! When I clean up a book that has active readers I secretly hope that they notice and are happy about the update 
amazing, thank you! 
For what it’s worth, I believe the current standard is to have the space, so as to make searching easier from a code perspective. If @nikoru and folks have a secret plan in regards to that with the updates, though, I’m personally not privy.
(Disclaimer: I’d like to pick the community’s brain for thoughts related to site organization/usability, but please keep in mind that, unless something is officially announced as in the works by brandon or a dev (nikoru, mathew), this is all just me gathering thoughts and chatting with you folks, and not any indication of community feedback being directly used in development at present time.)
A long-term question I’ve wanted to bring up for a bit, especially with the overhaul being worked on behind the scenes, is what the community thinks in regards to our current selection of book types.
)One of the big areas of user feedback is in regards to these categories, and I know the topic’s been brought up several times on the forums. The biggest couple of topics of conversation that come to mind at the moment are:
Perhaps you guys are fine as-is; I’m mostly wanting to get a feel on the community pulse. I believe @brandon has said in the past he’d rather not add a whole bunch of extra categories, if only for site maintainability reasons, and that feels like a valid consideration from a user’s perspective as well: how many categories are too many?
I personally read only light novels, light novels that are for some reason called “novels” and light novels with added furigana that are for some reason called “children’s books”.
(IMHO adding furigana to a book doesn’t make it a child’s book (as opposed to a book originally aimed at children as its audience) and with Ghost Hunt and No.6 I feel like the vibe is “it’s a novel because see, the cover doesn’t have characters”, but content-wise I can’t see it. Idk anymore what is a novel as opposed to light novel)
Makes you wonder what No. 6 would have been categorized as if we’d only had the tank covers to work from, right?
I think as the database grows there needs to be more clarity around how books are organised, both for librarians and users. For example, AL categorises LNs based on publisher which is easier than making judgement calls on each individual book/series. I’d like the categories grouped better, too.
Narrative Fiction
Manga/Comics
Non-Fiction (I’d include children’s non-fiction here, too)
Learner materials
Other
I agree that LNs with furigana should not be classified as children’s books. Also +1 for a short story collection category. “Anthology” like bibliothecary suggests seems like a broad enough term that it could include short story collections plus magazines, since I don’t think magazines really need their own category. Manga magazines are fine in the manga category imo.
An important distinction to make, I think.
As for what is or isn’t a light novel, I think going by publisher/imprint is a good method. Besides that, things which are kept on the light novel shelves/sections in bookshops in Japan are pretty safe to be called light novels. A very similar logic can be applied to what is a children’s book or not. It is abundantly clear in a real bookshop what category things are in normally, although there are naturally grey areas for some particular works.
I think the main weirdness may come from popular works being reissued in new formats and thus shifting across boundaries. I’d personally consider a book with full furigana a children’s edition, even if the original work was not necessarily aimed only at children. Where those are split off on Natively as their own entries, I’d personally put them in children’s since the edition is aimed at children (sometimes bowdlerized as well). The imprint is a children’s one and it is in the children’s section in the bookshop in these cases.
The above is just my opinion though. In terms of what mechaniclly helps most with searching for and organizing books, I can see both sides on this.
I don’t know what a light novel really is and at this point I’m too afraid to ask, but it seems to be important enough for Japanese to justify it having its own category.
As for the Anthology category, I agree that it could be a good way to add magasines, and distinguish between short stories and short story collections.
I think this would make a lot of sense, and would be great to see.
I think it’s a distinction worth maintaining, and don’t see much advantage to collapsing it, unless it generated a tremendous amount of edge cases that need refiling… Which I doubt
If you want to add something like “go by publisher/imprint if unsure, when determining light novel vs novel” to the Add Book page, maybe that will help reduce edge cases.
+1. Either option seems fine
