Expose text sections in the Manifold backend

[tsmyre]

Right now, when a text is ingested, the application only allows users to engage and describe it as a single entity without being able to address its component parts. Ideally, Manifold would expose views for individual text sections so that more granular metadata (e.g., makers, bibliographic metadata, descriptions/abstracts, identifiers like DOIs) could be ascribed to and surfaced in the application for that content. It would also be useful to make it so that access could be more precisely scoped to particular sections of a text.

Real-work applications where this functionality is needed are journals and conference/marketing events:

For journals, as a publisher I have issues saved in the EPUB format. I load them into Manifold and then assign article-level metadata. If it were then possible to render these text sections in a Texts block (or a new content block), where their title, maker, and description information could be displayed, that would be a welcome boon in keeping file finagling to a minimum (breaking EPUBs apart and loading as individual texts) and in keeping with the UX expectations for the journal format.

On the marketing side, as a publisher providing sample content at virtual exhibits and conferences, it would be useful to make only specific sections of a text openly available while the rest of the text required an entitlement. This would function as an override akin to the Ignore Access Restrictions? toggle we currently have for Texts. With this enabled, one could load an EPUB (without having to abstract specific content from it), and then selectively choose which sections could be viewed as samples of the larger whole. Associating a badge with the sample content would also likely be useful in a Table of Contents blocks so readers could quickly identify what they had access to.

[zdavis]

This is happening, more or less, as part of authoring.