Proposal for Recommending Books to Patrons/Lists

Please note that this is a proposal and staff has not approved this feature.

This issue is in response to #5937.

Problem

The problem, generalized, is that there exists either lists or collections of items and the community is expressing interest in letting others recommend a book to this data structure.

Risks & Reservations

Usage & Usefulness. How many people will actually Recommend / Suggest books to a person if the feature existed? I don't know. I don't think the number is that high. I'd love information from e.g. @seabelis about how often this happens on e.g. Goodreads.
Complexity & Dependencies. Let's assume we expect it to be a sufficiently used feature to merit the engineering time investment. It seems like for such a system, stakeholders are noting they may like to receive some sort of notification that a book recommendation has been made. A notification system (if not properly/minimally scoped) could be a complex and expensive dependency.
Scope & Approach. What is the right way to implement this feature to scope development time + approach; e.g. we probably can't justify building + supporting a new database table & models or a global notifications system for just this feature.
Performance. Avoid possible "read/write" risks such as an infogami document becoming huge and affecting page performance when lots of suggestions are made

Possible Implementation?

Already, the minimal solution I can think of has some risks and lacks many of the features (like notifications) which have been requested in #5937:

A new POST endpoint in plugins/openlibrary/api.py for a class called SuggestWorksFor(page, workids) which can work for various page types (including Lists, Reading Logs, and pages within /collections). We could add a button called "Suggest a book" on the collections page to start as an experiment. Clicking the button would launch a javascript dialog box which asks for 1 or more work IDs (which can be entered as either comma or space separated. The SuggestWorksFor API would make sure these work IDs are minimally valid and then fetch the page via infogami (i.e. I think it's web.ctx.site.get(pageid)) and append to or create a property on the page called suggestions which is a list of objects {"submitter": "", "work": "OLW"}.

"suggestions": [
    {"user123": "OL123W"},
    {"user234": "OL234W"},
]

Minimal notification The system would probably need some way for a non-technical patron to then (a) see that for a given page -- e.g. Reading Log, List, or Collection -- that the suggestions field is not empty and report a number. When the page is loaded, check if the patron has permission to edit the page and if so, show the count/length of the suggestions field.

Minimal Content Management System (CMS) The page owner would need some way to convert suggestions into action, which is itself a large engineering effort. What does the minimal solution look like? I suppose this would be done manually at first within the JSON / yml for the page (e.g. https://openlibrary.org/collections/k-12.yml?m=edit)

Reflections

As one can see, even the minimal solution without notifications requires a significant amount of engineering planning, clarification on a proposal which will require conversations, and has risks which still haven't been evaluated -- all this before we've obtained a clear understanding of the possible usage and value of this feature for/to patrons.

Stakeholders

@tmanarl

internetarchive / openlibrary