I have been trying to dodge this conversation for a bit, especially as @Burnett mentioned that some sort of ANV feature will eventually happen.
However, until it happens, how do we want to proceed?
Should we be recording credits “as they appear” - and accept that some merging or linking will take place later?
Or, should we continue to use near matches when we know they exist - and accept that others may end creating duplicates credits that will need merging and linking?
“Faber and Faber Limited” rather than “Faber & Faber Ltd”
“R. MacLehose & Co. Ltd Glasgow” rather than “Robert MacLehose and Company Limited”
the “Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare” rather than “The Literary Trustees of the late Walter de la Mare”
I did my best effort not to create duplicates (a behaviour I’ve inherited from using discogs), but I sacrificed fidelity in the process.
Note: I don’t want to dwell on the specifics of Faber and Faber and what their legal name is now and in the past - I don’t consider it’s relevant to the point: the accuracy of information.
In a way this already exists. In the raw edit mode, each credit consists of an :id and separate :title. The credit title on the book/edition entity can be:
Changed to something else without impacting the credit itself.
Is not updated if/when the linked credit is changed.
ANV functionality could take advantage of that fairly easily.
I believe it would be better to focus on fidelity now, and accept the creation of duplicate credit entities, which can be dealt with by script update later on.
The alternative route means that once ANV functionality is here, we’ll be pulling every book off the shelf again to update them separately (assuming we care about the accuracy of the database).
Does this work? Can you change the :title without it affecting the link to the :id, whilst displaying the alternate text? And if the entry is updated it doesn’t revert? If this works like that it would be a good, though somewhat cumbersome way to have the best of both worlds.
I’m not sure that a script would be able to handle such duplicates with enough accuracy. Credits may be attributed to names similar enough to be possible duplicates, but which are intentionally separate. How could someone identify them? I agree though that data fidelity is more important than fudging the data to handle early developmental shortcomings.
Yes it works today - but it’s cumbersome as you say. Honestly, I feel evil promoting it, as it’s undocumented behaviour that could be removed later - so don’t use it in this way.
One impact of this is, that if we decide to rename a credit for a legitimate reason (maybe a typo). All the entries linked to it keep whatever the previous title was.
I agree, though I’m hoping @Burnett might chime in and say if a future ANV-equivalent would use a formalised implementation of this approach in some way, or not. If so, it would be ok to use it in the interim.
Good discussion. dzed is right that the system already does this. It was designed to support ANV-like behavior. Internally it’s called a linked-entity and contains :id and :title fields (the thing it’s linking to, and the display text). They’re independent. So you can link to “Faber and Faber” but display “Faber & Faber” if that’s what’s printed on the edition.
Right now that’s only accessible through raw edit, which isn’t ideal. Adding it to the normal form is not a big deal and can be done quickly. I’ll try a few variations and get it out. Sound ok?
And for now feel free to do this via the raw edit form. But a proper UI is coming soon.
I have noticed a small bug. I don’t know if it explicitly applies to this scenario alone, but when I edit an Edition and change only the :title property’s value for a credit (and add an edit note) and then click Save, nothing appears to happen. No indication that an edit has been done, no page load, nothing. The edit does save, but without any UI feedback, I didn’t notice at first and kept trying to work out why nothing was happening.
edit: also the history doesn’t update with my edit comment
Ok, I have updated the form to include a better UI for managing the credits and links to other docs. Now you can click the gear icon to edit the “Display as” field (which is :title underneath). It includes an asterisk after the link, just like Discogs ANV does.
It took me a while to think through the cleanest way to display this.
This works, cheers. It’s good that the url of the credit now shows with the original name so it’s fairly easy (on a desktop browser, at least) to see what the original profile name is. Previously it linked to a url with the alternate :title in it and there was no way of telling it was linking to a profile with a name variation until you visited the link, and some pages take a long time to load.
It might also, if possible, be a good idea to list under a credit’s main header section all of the alternate :titles used for that credit. That would make it both easier to see which variations can be used for a credit, and which have been used incorrectly.
I’m thinking of things such as publishers and the like with variously ‘Ltd’ ‘Ltd.’ ‘Inc’, etc, and assorted minor and major name changes over the years. It’s not always clear where a new profile is warranted, and seeing what others have done would be a way to boost confidence. Especially if the usage-count of each variation could also be included.