openlibrary
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Verified_fields: Allow librarians to lock certain work/edition fields
Describe the problem that you'd like solved
As of:
- #7495 ...when we encounter new data (such as new publishers) the importer biases towards appending them to the list. In some cases where a librarian has verified a publisher (or book cover) we may want to lock these fields to prevent confusion: as described in:
- #7744
For now, let's start with publishers
and covers
as fields librarians can lock
- the UI might introduce a checkbox (librarian-only) on the /edit page next to covers and publishers to lock these fields
- the importer should ignore importing fields which existing the
verified_fields
array - the
verified_fields
should exist on both the work and the edition
Stakeholders
@seabelis
This is potentially useful on its own, but I'm not entirely sure that this directly addresses the issue that @seabelis is seeing.
The appending of extraneous data isn't in any way limited to editions that librarians have touched; probably the vast majority of cases are on records that no one's even noticed yet. As I understand it, what's happening is:
- The importer creates an edition and populates the record (hopefully correctly)
- A later import matches that same edition and merges in new, less useful data
As I see it, it looks like a pure import problem. There are any number of ways we could address it, such as:
- Configure the importer to just stop appending new data to populated fields (globally or specific fields)
- Establish some ranking of data sources, and use that to resolve differences (e.g. if an edition was created from an IA MARC record, then a BWB import can't modify any already populated fields)
In the abstract, I think a librarian lock for fields we don't want messed with is probably a good and useful thing, but I don't think it really resolves the problem that prompted the idea.