On 04-May-2012, at 2:40 PM, Ben Companjen wrote:

> On 4 May 2012 05:52, Anand Chitipothu <[email protected]> wrote:
>> [...]
>> Open Library has a field in edition records for storing ocaid,
>> the IA identifier, that contains a single value.
>> 
>> This created us two troubles.
>> 
>> 1. If the same edition is scanned more than once, there is no way
>> to represent it. We often end up creating duplicate editions with
>> different ocaids, which is not really the right way.
>> 
>> 2. The case of multi-volume scans, where an edition is split into
>> multiple volumes and each is scanned separately.
>> 
>> We've tried to handle that by using a "volumes" filed in edition
>> records. This filed takes a list of values, each of type
>> /type/volume. Each entry in volumes contains the volume number,
>> label and the IA id.
> 
> That seems appropriate. And if there are multiple scans of the same
> volume, one can enter the same volume number?
>> 
>> It didn't really work well and we stopped doing it. You can still
>> see traces of it in some editions.
> 
> Didn't it work well because you need API access (i.e. use a bot) to
> update the records? Is there another way to let users handle this?
> Like a form that takes TOC style input, i.e. <ocaid> | <label> |
> <volume number>, or a form with a text field for each of these.
> Perhaps only available in super-librarian mode?

I don't think it was just an edit UI issue.

Most of the system is designed to look for ocaid field to check if an edition 
has a scan or not. 

To support multiple volumes, we need to change:

* Change the edition edit page to allow entering multiple scans.
* Change the edition view page to display, multiple volumes or duplicate scans 
or both.
* Need to decide how to display the read link on work, subject and search pages 
when an edition has multiple scans. 
* Need to consider multiple-volumes in search indexing
* Might have to change the books API to handle this. We may even have to add 
new fields to the books API.
* Change the import code to add a new volume instead of adding new edition

I think it involves a lot of work.

I would really like to work on some low-hanging fruits first than attempt such 
a big task.

Anand
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