Titles with no place associations behavior

[jduss4]

Recently, we discovered several of our titles are missing the 752 marc field. This meant that though they could display data indicating that they were from "Lincoln, Neb," they were not actually associated with that core_place in the database.

It led to some funky behavior:

• those titles did not display on the /newspapers page because they lacked a "state"
• when viewing a specific page of an issue, it threw a 500 error from a bad solr request

I suspect that there may have been more effects which I didn't test, like not being reflected by city and state filters / counts on search result pages, not displaying in the search select forms, etc.

We are filling out a form to get their marc catalog records changed, but I am wondering if we want to have a contingency plan for this in ONI. Specifically:

• will we have publications that do not have a defined location?
• will dropping the state from the newspapers listing page be UI only, or will we also alter browse.py to allow titles with no place through?
• should we put in a try-catch block to prevent failing "similar pages" searches?
• do we want to pull out the similar pages functionality entirely, the way that chronam seems to? (see commits on browse.py and index.py for more removals)

[jechols]

The work I'm doing to pull newspapers by city will skip anything lacking a city just like the current system skips anything lacking a state. We could hack it up to include those, I think, but it may result in odd errors since so much of the logic expects some kind of location value.

Given that there are likely to be more papers lacking a city than lacking a state, I'm thinking my work will need more testing than I was hoping.

[jechols]

Actually, looking closer at this, there may be a way to just make the newspaper list a lot more agnostic than what I've done so far. I'll push something for #278 in the next few days hopefully.

[jduss4]

@jechols do you know if this is done?

[jechols]

Ugh, I clearly dropped the ball somewhere here. I think this will require a re-test on a vanilla instance of ONI :(

[raybrarian]

Related: #28