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rism-digital / muscat

🗂️ A Rails application for the inventory of handwritten and printed music scores
http://muscat-project.org
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Should the number of occurrences in Secondary Literature appear in authority record list? #1392

Closed fjorba closed 6 months ago

fjorba commented 1 year ago

Currently, in the list view for People, Institution, or any other authority records, there is a column with the number of sources where this entry occurs. However, it says nothing about how often it occurs in secondary literature records.

I suspect that this information would be as useful for the main Muscat instance for RISM as it is for us at UAB. However, before providing a patch, I'd like to know if you are interested in it.

A different issue is that there is not much space left with the current design of those authorities list as created with the ActiveAdmin gem. I think that it can optimized, but that will be another issue that I'll open soon.

So, to make it clear: I can provide a patch for creating those counters (it is basically a copy&paste of the sources one, so no black magic here), and it requires a Solr reindex. The fact that those counters appear now or later on the list would be a different patch, maybe related with the optimization of the current list.

xhero commented 1 year ago

Yes! This is a long standing wish and I never came around to fixing it. One problem is indeed that we don't have much column space left, we could think of a way to condense the counters? @jenniferward ?

fjorba commented 1 year ago

One problem is indeed that we don't have much column space left, we could think of a way to condense the counters? @jenniferward ?

Please see #1405 with some ideas about optimizing column space.

xhero commented 1 year ago

@jenniferward When you have a moment can you look at this? Showing the count for all the linked items is something I would like to have since it is quite confusing if an auth file links to things other than a source.

fjorba commented 1 year ago

As a matter of fact, those counters already appear in /admin/places.

xhero commented 1 year ago

Yes I think I added some of those in some auth files, but we could expand it to all for consistency

jenniferward commented 1 year ago

Transparency in linking would be good across authorities, as it is in Places. Including the Secondary Lit would be helpful because it can help us weigh at a glance how much attention to give to a person or institution: maybe they are not relevant for historical sources but are instead a modern author or commercial publisher that is there only because they are in the Lit.

For RISM's purposes the Secondary Lit just serves as "support" for the Sources so that we format our citations consistently. It's not really an authority file in the same way that the rest are (it's basically a bibliographic database). I wouldn't prioritize adding extra columns to https://muscat.rism.info/admin/publications in RISM's Muscat though of course that might be useful for the UAB. Our catalogers need to see at a glance the basic bib info that we have now (Short title, Title, Author), and the number of people or places it is linked to is really not relevant.