internetarchive
Subject pages should behave like /search?
One of our patrons says:
Is there a way to browse a subject that allows me to use, say, a list format (like a regular search page) rather than the carousel? For subjects that contain a lot of books--Diaries, for instance, has over 14K--looking at six books at a time is wildly inefficient, and there's no way to save your place and come back to it later. Worse, on my system (Windows 8.1; current Firefox), the carousel sticks every couple of clicks and I have to wait anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes for it to resolve itself and load the next section of carousel; after a while it refuses to load anymore at all. I really enjoy poking around in subjects just to see what's available, and I've looked for some setting or link to allow me to browse in list form, but--am I just overlooking it somewhere?
In the future we'd like to use carousels for the subject home page (https://openlibrary.org/subjects) which currently could use a lot of improvement, and perhaps instead show /search style view on the individual subjects pages.
Give this to the person: https://openlibrary.org/search?q=subject%3ADiaries&mode=everything
I agree that the carousel display paradigm is painful for this, but the search that feeds it is also broken / underperforming, which is what is causing the long delays that the user is seeing. In the example I just played with it took from 12 seconds for https://openlibrary.org/subjects/space_flight.json?limit=12&offset=12 to complete to a couple of seconds for most of the subsequent pages (which is still pretty long such a small request).
Separately, we should investigate why these search queries are so slow.
Yes, please. The ability to filter on additional subjects within results would also be handy.
This seems like a combination of problems: 1) The subject page needs a redesign 2) Subject search is broken/performing poorly. Should 2) be it's own issue?
There no longer seems to be an issue with the search performance (the example above completes in ~250 msec even when varying the offset), so I suggest keeping this focused on the UI aspect.
Perhaps its as simple as offering a UI affordance which allows the user to choose https://openlibrary.org/search?q=subject%3ADiaries&mode=everything and an alternative to https://openlibrary.org/subjects/diaries which is a 14,000+ entry carousel.
Changing the subject page layout is going to expose some data quality issues. The 1st and 3rd of the top "diary" authors are publishers of wall calendars.
And other top "authors" include publishers of both blank diaries/journals and wall calendars:
https://openlibrary.org/search?q=subject%3ADiaries&author_key=OL2879178A&mode=everything https://openlibrary.org/search?q=subject%3ADiaries&author_key=OL3833474A&mode=everything Blank Journals Paperblank Book Company
