Hi Xan, No cynicism taken ;) Hopefully this will make my view clearer.
"adding a field" to records is as easy as adding it to the JSON document that is an Open Library "record" and putting it on the server. However, there is no formal submission process for field suggestions nor rules for creating coherent field names. I suggested other fields on GitHub too, like VIAF id for authors [2] or more recently "has index/bibliographic references/illustrations" [3]. There needs to be an agreement on the name of the field and in case the field value is not a reference to an OL thing, the form of the value would be useful (e.g. should VIAF id contain the complete URI, or just the number at the end of the URI?). "publishers" is already taken for the list of strings that publisher names are in (see [4] for all 'official' fields in Edition records). Let me suggest "publisher_ids" that should contain a list of references to pages of type `/type/publisher`. The not-so-easy part is adapting the web interface and setting up extra stuff on the backend. If you edit a Work and type an author name, an index is queried to suggest authors from the list of authorities. Such an index is also needed if we want users to connect a publisher name to an authority. Creating such an index for authors has apparently been very resource intensive (I believe the author index misses some updates, since it broke last year; new updates are indexed). Therefore, a new server may be needed for an index like this. [2] https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/144 [3] https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/199 [4] http://openlibrary.org/type/edition Regards, Ben On 16 August 2013 10:34, xan <x...@0l3.de> wrote: > Am 16.08.2013 09:23, schrieb Ben Companjen: >> It's not as easy as it looks, I think, because selecting the correct >> authority (like you select an author in editing a work) requires a >> Solr engine for the publisher names. And to build an authority file we >> need rules (what is a publisher? do we want "printed by ..." to count >> as publisher, or will we create a printer authority as well, while >> we're at it?) > Why not? Is it not common OpenLibrary practice to have a lot of fields and > depending on the user and the quality of data documented in the book itself, > more or less are filled in? > >> The "add a field to records" part is trivial for OpenLibrary. >> > You mean you could do it? Or trivial in the sense that it would take few > minutes of work but isn't likely to happen? > > I don't wanna sound cynical. I really don't. Sorry about that. > > xan > _______________________________________________ > Ol-discuss mailing list - Ol-discuss@archive.org > http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss > Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-discuss@archive.org/ > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to > ol-discuss-unsubscr...@archive.org _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list - Ol-discuss@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-discuss@archive.org/ To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-discuss-unsubscr...@archive.org
