Allow "present" for interviewee bio job end dates.

[rachellane12]

It would be great to have an empty end date for the interviewee bio. Sometimes interviewees are still in a position and right now, there's no way to not have a date. Also, writing "present" doesn't work because it only accepts dates. Example: It's not clear from Helen Donis-Keller's interviewee bio that she is still working in her positions at Olin College of Engineering. Dr. Shirley Malcom is another example. She's still in her position at AAAS.

Later note from @rachellane12 :

I've left blank end dates before, but then it showed that Donis-Keller for example was a professor at Olin only in 2001, which obviously isn't accurate since she's still there. I'm open to whatever solution is best to address that situation, but I do think it would be beneficial to have some way to indicate that someone is currently in a position.

[eddierubeiz]

@rachellane12: I've taken a crack at this. Take a look at

• https://staging-digital.sciencehistory.org/works/uwilrto
• https://staging-digital.sciencehistory.org/admin/interviewee_biographies/6/edit when you have a minute please (presumably on Tuesday :) ).

If we go with this solution, you can (and should) enter the word "present" in the date field if you want the job to read "to present" on the front end, as opposed to leaving the end date blank. (If you leave it blank, the front end will just show the start date, as before.

[rachellane12]

@eddierubeiz This looks great. Exactly what I had in mind for interviewees who happen to still be working.

[eddierubeiz]

@rachellane12 - last week we were discussing a different solution:	In real life	Start field in the form	End field in the form	Displayed to users
Interviewee is considered to be still working there	2012	blank	2012 to present
Interviewee only worked there for a year	2012	2012	2012

[rachellane12]

@eddierubeiz That seems like a good solution because it addresses both needs that we have. Thanks for looking into this!

[eddierubeiz]

Sounds good! @rachellane12 - just to be consistent, let's go over a dozen or so interviewees that currently have blank job end dates in their bios. (Just fill in an end date identical to the start date unless you really want the job to read "to present".) (I removed the present end dates from the back end for Donis-Keller and Malcom, so they'll show up correctly once we're done.

This is probably easier to do after the new code is in production, but whatever works for you!

Interviewee	URL	Jobs with blank endings
Zheng	https://digital.sciencehistory.org/admin/interviewee_biographies/5856/edit	HHMI Investigator
Luskin	https://digital.sciencehistory.org/admin/interviewee_biographies/5917/edit	Assistant Professor, Anatomy and Cell Biology
Newman	https://digital.sciencehistory.org/admin/interviewee_biographies/5725/edit	Director, NIDA-IRP Medication Development Program;Chief, Molecular Targets and Medications Discovery Branch Chief, Medicinal Chemistry Section;Scientific Director, National Institute on Drug Abuse Intramural Research Program
Enke	https://digital.sciencehistory.org/admin/interviewee_biographies/1/edit	Professor Emeritus
Solnica-Krezel	https://digital.sciencehistory.org/admin/interviewee_biographies/7517/edit	Professor and Head, Department of Developmental Biology
Diedrich	https://digital.sciencehistory.org/admin/interviewee_biographies/5/edit	Infectious Disease Research Staff Scientist;Founder and President
Panning	https://digital.sciencehistory.org/admin/interviewee_biographies/5939/edit	Associate Professor, Biochemistry & Biophysics
Anagnostopoulos	https://digital.sciencehistory.org/admin/interviewee_biographies/9/edit	Research Chemist;Monsanto Fellow;Corporate Officer and Vice Chairman of Corporate Development and Growth
Augustine	https://digital.sciencehistory.org/admin/interviewee_biographies/10/edit	Acting Secretary of the Army;Chairman;Chairman;President and Chairman;Founder;Chairman;Chairman;Member;Member
Leone	https://digital.sciencehistory.org/admin/interviewee_biographies/5667/edit	Director of the Medical College of Wisconsin Cancer Center

[eddierubeiz]

@rachellane12: this fix is now deployed in production if you want to edit the interviews above.

Note for instance that https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/7scdjah shows Leone's 'Director' position as 2020 to present (which seems right).

As of now, for the jobs above, if you don't want to list "present" as the end date for a job, just reenter the start date in the end date field for that job.

[rachellane12]

@eddierubeiz Wonderful! Thanks to you and @jrochkind for your work on this and coming up with a situation that makes sense both on the backend and frontend. I'll work on updating the interviews you listed above this week.

[rachellane12]

@eddierubeiz Okay, we ran into a slight hiccup, and I defer to you and Jonathan (and Annabel) as to how to handle this. When I went to update some of the interviews in question, I came across two issues (which I also mentioned to Dave):

• We have some interviews where we don't know the start or end date. Examples: Sha, Gall, Waldor, Sadler, and Lee. Is there a way for no date to show up at all if both start and end dates are blank?
• We also have some interviews where we don't know the end date. For example, Waldor at Tufts University. School of Medicine. It says only 2000 on the chronology in the DC. Because the 2004 transcript says "present," I know he was there at least through 2004. I wasn't able to find a CV/LinkedIn online to see if that is still accurate, but it seems like he's at Harvard now. Dave wonders if there would there be a possibility of adding an "unknown" option for those where there is a start date but an unknown end date. I don't know how that would work in the code since we already have a present option.

Per usual, this is oral history throwing a wrench into things. It may be that we need to have a larger discussion about this. I didn't realize it would be so challenging!

[jrochkind]

When you say "we have some interviews", we're still talking about dates of jobs listed in biographical material, not dates of the interview, right?

How were these being handled before the recent intervention, is there a reason it changed or needs to change? Or you found the data was not quite right before, this is a pre-existing issue you recently discovered? I think maybe they way these are listed now is how they were listed in the old "microsite", that we copied, but you're deciding that was insufficient and needs to be improved, maybe?

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding, maybe we should talk on zoom? I'm at a conf this week, but avail next week.

In general I'm also curious what your plan is for the ones you are listing as "present" -- that obviously wont' remain present forever, do you have a process already in mind for how you will notice to go back and updates those? That seems relevant to the one where you don't know the end dates because it was listed as "present" originally -- isn't that going to happen a lot? You would plan to periodically go and check them all to update them with a date, or with "unknown"?

[eddierubeiz]

@rachellane12 I fixed the first problem, which was due to an oversight on my part - sorry about that! See e.g. https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/v6kmkyc .

[rachellane12]

@eddierubeiz Wonderful! Thanks for doing that.

@jrochkind Regarding the second issue, yes, I do mean the dates of jobs listed in the biographical material. Before how things were handled is that only the start date was listed if no end date was listed, but this made it seem that the interviewee was only in that position for a year (because we do have examples of people being in positions for just a year). I originally noticed this when we had interviewees like Donis-Keller and Malcom who were at their current positions and weren't just there for one year and I wanted it to show correctly, hence my thought of "present."

Obviously, there is a lot of stuff that has come up since my initial discovery, namely, that there are interviews that don't have any job start/end dates at all (I didn't realize that) and at least one interview where I wasn't able to find an end date for a position online (ex: Waldor). I honestly didn't expect as many interviewees with blank job end dates as Eddie identified.

I do think it could be good to have a broader discussion about how to handle updating metadata in the DC specifically regarding "present." As of right now, we update job information whenever an interviewee lets us know about a change in position or if it's something that we notice.

I don't exactly know what the solution to all of this is, but I do think that there should be a way to distinguish when an interviewee holds a position for just one year and when all we know is the start date. I'm all for talking on Zoom next week. I want to give you the information you need so that we can come up with the best solution.

[eddierubeiz]

For the second problem (you have a start date; you know the person isn't in the position any more; you don't know when the person stopped working there): granted, there's some ambiguity about how to interpret the absence of an end date. In other words, the table above should really be:

In real life	Start field in the form	End field in the form	Displayed to users
Considered to be still working there	2012	blank	2012 to present
Only worked there for a year	2012	2012	2012
Started there in 2012; end date unknown	2012	2012	2012

[jrochkind]

Is the second category still right now displaying the same way it did before we started changing things?

I think yeah we need to take a big picture look at these dates and develop a "model" based on considering them in whole and all the various edge cases we can think of that matter or are present in the data, not just the latest "problem" we noticed most recently. Or we end up going around in circles with always just one more thing.

We can also consider how high a priority this really is -- if it's been displaying this way for 6-7 years with nobody noticing/complaining until now, perhaps it's not super high priority to fix? But maybe it is! But we have infinite things we could make better in the Digital Collections, we ("we" being all of us, stakeholders) need to consider what improvements are worth how much time when.

[rachellane12]

@eddierubeiz Yes, that table is accurate. I appreciate you putting it in that form because it helps make our discussion more clear.

@jrochkind Regarding the larger issue, I agree that a discussion will help to avoid going in circles and to identify the priority. I will say that I have had interviewees reach out to correct their information and ask that it be updated and in one case, it was a user who had identified an error in chronological information about an interviewee (example below). Honestly, it would be so much easier if interviewees kept in touch because then it's an easily solved problem!

Edited with example: Ernest Volweiler

In February 2022, Annabel received an email from Gregory S. Girolami that said:

In https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/vh53ww850, Ernest Volweiler is incorrectly said in a table to have obtained his MA and PhD degrees from the University of Illinois at Chicago; in fact, he was a graduate student at the Urbana-Champaign campus and never was at UI Chicago.

The transcript itself said University of Illinois but did not specify whether Chicago or Urbana-Champaign; I assume either in the microsite or the DC somehow Chicago was added accidentally. I did some research to confirm that Volweiler had indeed been at Urbana-Champaign.

I know this goes beyond the "present" issue, but I do think it connects to the larger issue of comments we get from users/interviewees about the biographical/job information.

[apinkney0696]

Hi y'all, just popping in to offer my two cents.

It's not our business how OH chooses to update biographical metadata as new information comes about, but I do suggest establishing a workflow to verify the data is correct every so often. Maybe this is when an interviewee dies, maybe you'll go through living interviewees' data annually, or maybe you just want to make updates when someone reaches out to correct the data - it's up to you, but it's likely a decision you'll want to have documented somewhere. If you'd like help with making this decision, I'd be happy to help advise you as I'm sure any of the other cataloging folks would be!

It sounds like we have fixed the issue of providing a "present" option for interviewee bio dates. I'm going to close this ticket as the original task has been completed.

Now a new need has presented itself: the ability to have "unknown" dates within user bios. At this point, I suggest going through the collection to identify if there are any additional interviewee bios that don't fit into the following categories we've already established:

• dates are known
• dates are known, currently holding position (will need to be updated eventually)
• one or both dates are unknown (may need to be updated if additional information is uncovered)

Try to find out if there are any other situations where the date metadata you have isn't working with our input form, and try to determine what changes will be most intuitive for you and the end-user in each situation. We may have a few weird outliers, and that's okay! Once you've done that, please make another ticket to address the unknown date issue and other situations as needed, then we'll go from there!

Does this sound like a good plan to everyone? Thanks!

[rachellane12]

@apinkney0696 That all makes sense to me. I will check in with Dave about this plan and after doing the research you've suggested create a new ticket for "unknown" dates.