Proposal

The view for merging works currently only displays the OL…A identifiers of works’ authors. I propose also displaying the name of each author.

Justification

It is hard to tell if the selected works are true duplicates. Because the OL…A identifiers are hard to visually parse, I cannot easily tell if there are works with the same title but a different author.

Also, if some of the works have different authors, the current merge view makes it impossible to tell if those authors are actually different or if it is a case of duplicate author records (i.e. same author name, but different OL…A identifier).

The proposed change would allow me to merge works quicker and without having to click through to author pages.

Breakdown

Requirements Checklist

• Update https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/blob/9641c21c548b588a8230ea19c25cc32c6ffc38cd/openlibrary/components/MergeUI/utils.js to have a new method, get_author_names(works: object[]) -> Promise<Record<str, object>>
  • This method takes all the author keys out of the work (use lodash's uniq and flatMap methods). They are located at .authors[].author.key (sample work)
  • makes a call to /search/authors.json with all the authors, eg key:(/authors/OL123A OR /authors/OL453A OR ...). Example: https://openlibrary.org/search/authors.json?q=key%3A(%2Fauthors%2FOL29079A%20OR%20/authors/OL53264A)&mode=everything&fields=key,name,birth_date,death_date
  • Returns an object that maps the author key to the document returned by the search response
• In https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/blob/32bb0bf5dcbb4d2a9d2d7dc86f01c66ad2c0c013/openlibrary/components/MergeUI/MergeTable.vue
  • Create a new asyncComputed, augmentedRecords, that makes a copy of this.records (use _.cloneDeep), fetches the author data with the above method, and adds the name field to the author object in the copies. (The copy is needed to avoid accidentally saving this data back into open library).
  • Update the template to use the augmentedRecords when it's displaying the records.

That should largely do it!

For development/testing: Start the vue serve for live reloading

npm install --no-audit
npm run serve --component=MergeUI

And then go to eg http://localhost:8080/static/components/?records=OL1233242W,OL12312W

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