Consider use of RoR for organization contributors

[justinlittman]

To be considered is whether a RoR autosuggest should be used for organization contributors and/or if the RoR URI should be persisted.

For consideration:

• Of the existing organization contributors, only roughly a third are for organizations included in the RoR registry. Will users be confused by an autosuggest that in most cases excludes their organization?
• Will users be able to figure out how to correctly enter an institution like "Hopkins Marine Station" that should properly be affiliated with Stanford, but would not be found in the autosuggest?

[amyehodge]

@astridu I'd like your thoughts on this. Thanks.

[justinlittman]

The concern is that we'll be making this more complex, but still end up with worse data.

[amyehodge]

@justinlittman After some thought and evaluation of how this field is being used, the one case for organizations where it would be helpful and I think clear for users to have the ROR lookup is for when they choose the role degree-granting institution. What do you think about implementing it for just that particular role?

Otherwise, the decision is not to implement the ROR lookup for other types of organizations.

[justinlittman]

Is it worth 3 days of development time and another healthy serving of complexity? (This would require a completely different implementation than already done for individual affiliations.)

[amyehodge]

I've been thinking about this and yes, I think it is worth it.

[justinlittman]

Let me make a counter-proposal. Of the 132 entries for degree granting institutions, 131 are for Stanford. Of those, 126 have the term "Stanford" in them. (Autosuggest wouldn't help for the 5 that don't have Stanford on them since Stanford wouldn't get suggested, e.g., if the user entered "Department of History".) What if when mapping to cocina we added the ROR for Stanford when the term "Stanford" is present? Except for 1 entry that would have produced the same outcome with a fraction of the complexity (both code and UX).

[justinlittman]

Actually, statistically speaking the optimal approach would be just to add the Stanford ROR to all degree granting institutions: it would have been correct in 131 out of 132 entries.

[amyehodge]

@justinlittman Interesting. The more conservative option of looking for Stanford feels safer to me, but even that is way less complex. I wonder what @arcadiafalcone thinks about this (I know she's out). Many of these entries include departments or school, but I think technically that information should have been in a separate entry for "department." I'm wondering how she feels about having that ROR but not having the text technically match the ROR entry.

Throwing out this option -- what if for degree granting institution instead of just presenting the empty text entry box, we present them with 2 options: 1) a way to choose "Stanford University" where they don't type at all and 2) a way to type in an entry if it's something else? I would hope that that would keep us from getting department info in this field (assuming we don't want that here), though of course some people may still type in Stanford School of Education or whatever.

[justinlittman]

This would be ~1 day of development time, so less work than the original proposal but more work than my simple proposals (~1.5 hours). Just giving LOE here, not judgment on the value of different approaches.

[amyehodge]

@arcadiafalcone has indicated a preference for allowing the user to choose Stanford without typing anything and then to have free text entry if the institution is not Stanford.

She said "I’d rather privilege accuracy. Ideally the user would be able to select Stanford with the ROR but also add a school or department."

I've requested some additional clarity on the additional department information.