Navigate collection via user/roles

[jangari]

This is probably a major feature, but I think it is one that would be very handy for us internally, and useful for people browsing the collection.

Since users are referenced in collections and items in a whole bunch of ways, we could make use of these relationships and display them from a user page. Say someone browses the collection and finds an item of interest, and they see that the speaker was 'Fred Smith'. They could click the name and be taken to a page that lists all Fred's links to collections and items. Maybe he's a speaker in a bunch of items and maybe a singer in some other ones. He might even be listed as a recorder for a collection, perhaps.

So this user page would list the 'roles' table and provide links to both collections and items in which Fred has a role (along with the role he has in that item/collection).

Similarly, an admin user could do the same, but they would also see Fred's administrative relationship with items and collections. For example, it will show that Fred is 'collector' of a collection FS1, and editor of his colleague's collection MS1 (or whatever). It could also show that Fred has been given download access to a bunch of collections. Admins will also see a link to Fred's user account page which displays his address and contact details and whatnot, and the admin can furthermore edit Fred's account.

So a regular person navigating the archive, when clicking on any linked name, would see something like this:

And an admin would see this:

One use for such a user page would be for the admins to check whether this Fred is the same Fred Smith who just created an account, and should therefore be merged with that user account (as discussed at #384).

Also, the rif-cs feed currently creates RDA party records for collectors. It might be handy if they linked back to a useful page (currently they simply link to a page that only admins can see), from which the casual user might like to see what else that person has done. Also, I distinctly recall that some people in the collection are listed as recordists of items in other people's collections. That information is obscured unless we can navigate by users.

[jangari]

@nthieberger @LindaBarwick thoughts?

[nthieberger]

This is a good idea, but not as high a priority as getting streaming access to the media or DOIs for example. It is possible to search and find people names now, and visualising relationships within the catalog will be something good to have later, allowing various ways of navigating the catalog that are not bound up in textual searches.

[jangari]

Agreed. Something for much later. However it might be simple to determine, on the basis of the structure of the database, whether this is easy, complex, or impossible. Maybe Terem could keep this in mind when they investigate the database structure.

[johnf]

Maybe this turns into an oni thing